PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

Affiliate marketing is growing in popularity in Australia, with increasing numbers of merchants recognising the value of this style of performance-based marketing, while many web site owners are taking the opportunity to make use of web site real estate to earn some income.

At the peak of the pyramid are super affiliates who can take merchant product offerings and using advanced coding skills, provide hundreds if not thousands of product pages that can be access via shoppers using search engine results.

For most affiliates however, participating in this style of income generation is limited to the easier end of the coding scale - and limited to placing provided code on a web page.

This simpler approach can still be highly lucrative and well worth the time taken if done correctly.

Sadly, many affiliates do not take the steps needed to optimise their opportunities for income generation using affiliate links.

Partly, this is due to merchants who in good faith provide ‘marketing collateral ‘ in the form of a wide array of banners.

Lets look at banners and why they are not the most ideal method of generating click-throughs to the merchants website.

Many banners fail for one simple reason - they are designed to be logo exposure tools. The merchant may not know this, but the poor content of their banners means they are useless for anything else other than getting the logo/brand name into the market place.

The good part for them is that they can achieve this almost for FREE.

This is simply because the click-through rate and subsequent conversion rate is so bad, they never have to pay commissions because very few sales are ever made.

Sadly, even some of the biggest names in computers, finance etc are guilty of this, plus just about every smaller merchant who provides banners to affiliates.

Banners also fail because they often present such a generic message that there is no emotive response from the site visitor. A bland message generates a bland response.

So some merchants use flashing or animated banners. Word on many forums indicates that this can work in significantly increasing the click through rate - up to 100% in some cases (one click instead of none?)

Of course merchants are not all at fault here. Many affiliates are their own worst enemies.

I run affiliate programs and many times when I am looking to approve an affiliate and check out their site what do I see??

In many instances page after page of banner adds all listed down the page or not even arranged, but slotted together like a jigsaw puzzle so no space is wasted. Other times links pages double as a place to stick banners in the hope of garnering some click throughs.

Do these site perform? From the results I have seen - no.

So are banner ads useless?

In the most part one can say that many banner ads are not worth posting. The have no emotive draw to them or they have no call to action.

Some even feature out of date information or have been produced so poorly that the text and offer cannot be read (many of the big computer companies are guilty of these last two).

So when to use a banner ad?

1. When the banner is clear, has a solid offer and clear call to action
2. When the banner can be used within the page layout more effectively than say a small text ad
3. When the banner ad is used to ad some graphical interest to an otherwise dull page - especially if it features aspects of point 1
4. If you are doing an email campaign and a big, bold banner will be the best way to create a mood of desire that cannot be created with text content

A good banner ad is hard to create - I know I have created some shockers in my time - but a simple banner with a clear offer and call to action can still have a place in your marketing landscape - but there are better ways.

If you need help improving your affiliate performance or performance as an affiliate, we offer a reasonably priced consultancy service. Please contact matt AT plusone.com.au to discuss your needs.