I had a thought yesterday… Let’s say a sponsor has a pass with a half dozen sites in it, and they actively promote the fact that you get multiple sites with one membership, or in my case I promote the fact that the surfer gets multiple sites with one membership. So the surfer clicks and views a few of the sites before deciding to buy. The issue is that each site they visit counts towards the ratio for that site and makes the ratios look worse, when they may actually be pretty good…
For example, to use round numbers, let’s say all the sponsor sites convert 1:100 in terms of unique visitors, but the surfer looks at 3 sites in the pass before buying so the ratios would say 1:300. That shows what I’m talking about can have a pretty big impact.
I’m not quite sure how to do an apples to apples comparison between sponsors with passes and sponsors without passes. Thoughts?
Interesting question. I would say it probably equals out. Let’s assume that if they just had one site and it converted at 1:300 without the bonus sites, and the average surfer comes and clicks three sites and the ratio is 1:100 to whatever site they join. It’s still 1:300 with that sponsor. Though, it’s really 1:100… Interesting.
I have a friend / affiliate and all he markets is programs with multiple sites for one price. He creates his own “multi site” pages for each program and rather than send them to the main paysites he sends them to his multi site pages. His conversion numbers are insane.
Unless you are counting the clicks out to a sponsor via uniques, you can’t really get a 100% accurate conversion per unique if you are sendind them to multiple tours to check out.
The best way would be for an affiliate to track the uniques sent to a sponsor (not site) using open X (or and ad program) and compare that to the sales generated and what the sponsor tracks as uniques and a conversion ratio. Over a period of time the affiliate would get a ratio that would be pretty accurate.
I do know that advertising multiple sites helps ratios. It usually doesn’t help with an extra one or two sites, but having 5+ bonus sites helps the ratios even if it’s on a tour where they can’t visit the other sites.