Telephone numbers on banners
One of the main irritants in Affiliate Marketing has to be when merchants feature telephone numbers on their creative (banners). Why? Well it pretty much cuts out the need for a user to actually click the ad then purchase online.
Let’s say I spend about £8,000 a day (I do) on driving highly targetted visitors to my site. I really need to ensure that my site has landing pages that really urge the user to click through and then hopefully make a purchase from the merchants I choose to promote. By writing carefully crafted pre-sales copy my job is to give the user what they are searching for, be it a price comparison or specific details of a product/service. In other words, relevant targetted content/information. I then put a bit of a sales twist on it by using “call to action” phrases such as “click here to save”, “hurry! Special offer ends tomorrow” or similar.
All of the above takes time and huge amounts of trial and error. So imagine my disappointment when Bulldog Broadband go and stick a bloody huge freephone number urging *my* visitors that I have paid over £1 a click to acquire, to phone them and hence cut out my commission.
When will companies understand that the very basis of Affiliate Marketing is PAY FOR PERFORMANCE? Affiliate Marketing is not the same as traditional new media campaigns that are based on CPM models. We as affiliates do not get paid per 1000 impressions, we get paid per action/sale/lead. So by doing something like this the merchants is effectively gaining free branding at our expense. Matters are made even worse by the fact that when a user does actually click (presuming they haven’t called Bulldog for free and placed their order over the phone) on the banner and are sent to a landing page with *another* freephone number!
Needless to say I have spoken to the Account Manager at Tradedoubler who has met with Bulldog and stressed the importance of this issue. Time will tell to see if they do anything about it.
What I’m listening to right now: Shalamar - “A Night to Remember”
Sunday, January 8th, 2006 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
January 9th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
You spend 8k a day on PPC?
January 9th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Yes on Google AdWords, sometimes less, sometimes more.
January 11th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
8k a day is amazing.
Thats nearly £3m per year!!!
I thought I had spent a lot in the last year £45k but hell no!!
I have made a modest amount from affiliate marketing but you must be minted!!!!!
Its all well deserved thou i have been to your sites and they are great.
You are an inspiration to all of us other small fry affiliate marketers!!!
Cheers
January 12th, 2006 at 10:27 am
Morning Kieron - given your standing in the affy community, can you not ask them to provide you with your ‘own’ telephone number - this works well with one of my own merchants.
I simply refuse to promote anyone who prominently displays the telephone number - it’s a sheer waste of my time and effort.
good ‘un
January 12th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Hi Elaine,
there are some merchants who I promote who have given me a unique telephone number and it works very well.
However the problem with Bulldog is that their program is managed via a media agaency and then through Tradedoubler. Hence you have to go through many levels of red tape before you can get decisions made. I think in this case that a unique telephone number simply won’t happen.
Cheers!
January 14th, 2006 at 8:32 am
So if you spent £3m p.a. on PPC, how much do you make (profit)?
I don’t expect you to answer that but I thought I’d ask anyway.
BTW, if you have to spend so much money on PPC than I assume that natural search engine traffic isn’t coming in?
Just curious.
January 15th, 2006 at 2:37 am
A lot of affiliates don’t rely on natural search for their traffic.
Think about it, Google could update their rankings one day and put you out of business overnight. This makes PPC seem a lot more sensible from a business point of view.
January 15th, 2006 at 2:40 am
Yes, I am asking more from the point of why don’t affiliate sites rank well. Eg. A SEO related question.
I am not questioning anyone’s business tactics.