Improving Affiliate & Website Conversions with Real World Data
When I talk to brand owners and marketing officers about collecting Real World Data on product use and performance, a question that comes up every time is: How can I use it?
What’s really being asked is: How can I monetize Real World Data? How’s it going to help me sell more products?
We’ve seen brands monetize and get an ROI on Real World Data in many ways.
When talking about product sales, the two most common metrics are:
Increased conversion rate.
Increased average order size.
Let’s dig deeper into #1.
It’s a safe bet that if you have Real World Data on the use and performance of your product it’s going to increase your conversion rate. Assuming the Real World Data found your product(s) effective, beneficial, and/or of high quality.
This is true across all paid and organic marketing channels. Whether social, newsletter, blog articles, press releases, website, etc.
The increase might be minor, other times it will be significant. Regardless, it’s a safe bet that in the end if you do an A/B comparison, the content with Real World Data will have a higher conversion rate.
Examples of Real World Data improving conversion rate.
One brand we’ve worked with for a few years creates beautiful website content with the Real World Data we provide them. Given some of the numbers I’m sharing below, I'll keep the brand anonymous.
We have an affiliate contract with this brand and via our engagement with them we’ve had our affiliate links used in different settings both driving traffic to their site, and on certain CTAs on their site.
Here’s a great before vs after comparison.
After collecting data from a recent campaign with this brand, a publishing partner of ours was pushing traffic to the brand’s product description page. The promotion content focused on and highlighted data insights, but the page we were pushing them to (the brand’s product description page) did not.
There were a few data points mentioned at the bottom of the page. But you had to scroll all the way down.
We were pushing traffic to the product description page for 3-4 months and saw a 1.9% conversion rate. The lowest conversion rate that we, and our publishing partner, have ever seen.
We met with the brand to discuss improving the conversion rate of the traffic we were pushing them. We believed the conversion rate would go up if we pushed individuals to a lander page highlighting data that was collected.
We asked if they’d be open to creating such a lander. They were happy to try it.
We’re all glad they did.
The first 2 months of sending traffic to this lander, the average conversion was 13.46%. Up from 1.9% That’s more than 700% improvement on conversion rate.
It’s been 4 months now of pushing traffic to this lander and the average conversion rate is 7%. That’s still a 268% improvement on conversion rate. Just from highlighting Real World Data on the lander page.
Another Example of Real World Data Improving Website Conversion.
After a different campaign with the same brand they added a new page to their primary site navigation to highlight the data they collected.
Our affiliate links were included on this page so were able to get a glimpse of how this page performed in 2022 and 2023.
Included on this page were three buy now buttons. One at the top, middle, and bottom of the page.
In 2022, the average conversion rate we saw from the buttons clicked on this page was 29.18%. The lowest conversion rate from buttons on this page in 2022 was 22.37%. The highest was 36.61%.
In 2023 the average was 31.66%. The lowest conversion rate was 24.68%. The highest: 37.50%.
According to a few different articles, a good conversion rate for your website is between 1.5% - 5% (depending on the article you read).
Transparently, we were not informed on the overall traffic that was sent to this page between 2022-2023. And therefore do not know how many people landed on this page and did not click one of the three buy now buttons. All we could see is when buttons on this page were clicked, what the conversion rate was.
That said, during meetings with this brand we were told that page was/is the highest converting page for them in their SEO efforts. So much so that the entire content strategy for their site was wrapped around this page.
In this article I talk about the benefits of Real World Data for SEO, Google's EEAT, and how the data can help build trust, authority, etc. I mentioned in that article that these things result in better website conversion. This example is further evidence of that.
As mentioned above, sometimes the conversion rate increase is minor. Sometimes it’s significant.
In a game where every tenth of a point counts, I’d take any advantage out there to boost my conversion rate.
How can/would this work for your brand?
Let’s talk about it. Click here to contact us.