It's turkey time in the USA so thought i'd give back a quick and easy tip to help you make a little extra money on your next campaign. This tip has worked very well for me on facebook, but decided to post it here since it can be applied to other sources. (i've blogged about this tip before but i'm sure plenty of newbies could get something out of it.)
If you think words are hard or i'm just a long winded asshole I'll cut to the chase...
Split Test Your Domains!
If you're like me I'm sure you have quite the collection of random oddball domain names that you'll never use again from that campaign that died etc. So sometimes shelling out another $9 at namecheap for a new .com every time you get an idea seems stupid when you can just dig through your catalog of old stuff to run a quick test.
Some of you newbies are even submitting your actual affiliate url for the name your promoting. If you're having problems with WOT using your own URL with a redirect will get rid of that stupid 3rd party block page most of the time.
Moving on...
It's always urked me as an affiliate that i spend thousands of dollars promoting someone else site and whether the campaign makes me money or not the addy gets free brand exposure.
By using your own URLs you can get a piece of the pie. I'll use Z6's favorite niche robot dating as an example.
If you're going to test it out on facebook you might be inclined to build a nice fancy LP and stick it on that old url of yours www.nubmersandlettershaha.info
Something i've always noticed is that users especially on FB will type in a good domain if they see one! so instead of numbersandlettershaha.info maybe spend a few bucks to test out hotdirtybots.com or motherboardsexposed.com
[quick edit: wasn't sure if i made it clear it's not just about using .coms it's about split testing multiple ideas and putting in the same effort and thoughts as you would a headline]
I've been able to add as much as 20% extra clicks (traffic FO-free) to some of my campaigns just by trying out a nice simple 2-3 word url that's relevant to the niche. I've even seen my urls shared and tweeted about. The LP promoted the addys brand/offer but the URL being talked about was mine. Best of all this traffic often converts very well!
Obviously the next level on this tip is building your own site,white labeling, etc. lots of possibilities, but the point is when optimizing a campaign don't discount how much people care about what website you're sending them too.
Cheers and have a good holiday!
Good point. I think I saw this in relation to POF a while ago, where the guy was saying to buy your own domain and simply re-direct to your dating offer (or whatever). That way, you will get a few extra visits from people who type in the domain name. If you doing a lot of advertising, your branded domain will start to seep into the minds of the people viewing the ads.
I like this kind of thinking. 10-20% is huge especially if you are in a competitive niche. Even though I didn't implement this strategy on purpose I have reaped the rewards after a big camapign was stopped in it's tracks. The traffic still kept coming, even though it was down to a trickle.
Wow. Never considered this route. Will give it a try.
Nice tip, especially at $9 per pop!
But I'm very disturbed @ motherboardsexposed.com...
I'm actually split testing this thing, and for me I think the impact is even greater than 20% ROI... Will have results in couple hours, but I'm looking between 0.1% CTR vs 0.87% CTR over a 1000 clicks... That's like $0.08~$0.09 CPC vs $0.12 CPC on this demo, could make or break a campaign.
damn krueger! those are some killer results. For me it was about the type in traffic and the extra conversion here and there from those free clicks, but as you've shown even the name you use can have an impact on trust, CTR, etc. thanks for the share!