An Interesting Observation on my Affiliate Marketing Landing Page Data
If you’re an affiliate marketer you’d be familiar with the concept of creating a landing page where you give away something of value in order to capture a lead to follow up with your email marketing. Here’s an example of a landing page I created with Leadpages. I drive traffic to this page mostly through social media and traffic platforms such as Kris Clicks and Rebrandable Traffic.
As is common practice I included copyright info and a link to my privacy policy in the footer. However I also included a link to my “earnings disclosure” page, which many marketers don’t seem to do. This is one of those pages that you create to be fully transparent about how your site earns money and take care of any legal obligations. Like a privacy policy, you don’t really expect any significant traffic.
But here’s the interesting thing…
Despite being a small text link in the footer and dominated by the offer itself, many of the visitors who land on that page click on that link.
I was curious…why would so many visitors click on that link? What was their motivation?
My theory is that despite being targeted visitors (they would be unlikely to be on that page if they weren’t interested in the offer) they want to see what’s behind the offer. They want to see who is making the offer and despite the fact that it’s free they want to get a feel for how trustworthy and knowledgeable that person is.
After all, they know as well as you and me that they are going to be put on a mailing list if they fill out the form and people are much more cautious about that these days.
But let’s face it, the content of most earnings disclosure pages is pretty dry. I think most of all these people wanted to know if they could actually make money with affiliate marketing.
So with that in mind I included a link to my Affilorama review page at the end of the disclosure stuff. Affilorama is a free membership site which teaches affiliate marketing. To my mind, this was precisely the type of information they were interested in.
Looking at the data provided by Kris Clicks, and verifying that with Google Analytics, I could see that people were indeed following that link…
Initially, I had not included a link to my home page in the footer, but in light of these observations I decided to add it. And again, a fair number of visitors were clicking on that link. Not as many as the earnings disclosure, but I think their motivations were essentially the same. Importantly, many of those visitors navigated deeper into the site…
As you can see above…over 5 mins on site and click-throughs to affiliate marketing related pages.
The Take Away
The whole idea with a landing page is it’s singular in purpose. There should be as little distractions as possible. However I think it’s worth looking at your data and trying a few experiments. I still get conversions on the landing page…if that stopped I would remove the links straight away.
But by including some subtle footer links I feel I’m getting a second opportunity to convert that visitor, and the data seems to confirm that. I know they are interested in the offer but want to know more about me before handing over their email address. The earnings disclosure page still serves basic objective but perhaps now is just a little bit more sales focused.
What do you think?