281 clicks, no orders

September 13, 2007 on 3:05 pm | In Questions and Comments | 1 Comment

On CJ, I started a campaign with a new vendor PopCap (online games). Users can get free trials. Commission is paid if the customer signs up within 45 days. I reasoned that with a new vendor I wouldn’t have as much competition.
My ads got 281 clicks in 2 hours. I stopped the campaign to await results. It’s been at least a month and there have been 0 orders.

Tony, have you (or other members) had something like this happen? If the ads were good enough to get that many clicks, it seems to me the ads were OK.

Did I just happen to pick a bad product?

1 Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. Remember that a new vendor on CJ may have had an affiliate program on another network and may have competitors of its own, so you can’t assume less competition.

    More importantly, with a new program that has no established conversion rate there is a risk of encountering exactly what you’ve encountered… a program that looks like it should convert well (free registration) but doesn’t seem to be.

    I haven’t worked with PopCap, but I have worked with a number of free online gaming sites like it, and the problem I ran into was that they tended to have applications that included pages and pages of sign-up offers to newsletters, and other websites. Many people simply get fed up with the long application process and drop out.

    If you still want to try and make it work, you’d have to prepare people for this long offer by using your ad text. Perhaps a line like “Free Registration & lots of Free Offers!” This puts a positive spin on the free offers, but still helps weed out all the people who don’t want to wade through a lot of free offers. This should bring your number of clicks way down, but a higher percentage will eventually sign up.

    Of course, you are currently looking at somewhere between 0 and .5% conversion, so an improvement in CR would have to be pretty big to turn this around, but you never know till you try.

    I think this is a risky campaign to try to salvage, though, and I wouldn’t bet much money on it. If your not already making money on some other campaigns, don’t take the gamble.

    Tony

    Comment by Administrator — September 14, 2007 #

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Powered by WordPress with Pool theme design by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^