If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Many affiliate networks have a few identical offers that are available from the same advertisers. You might be inclined to think that, when choosing which network to promote a particular offer on, you should go with whoever will give you the highest payout per lead. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. You always need to test the same offer across multiple tracking platforms so that you aren’t losing out on any commissions.

Searching For An Alternate

I just experienced a great example of this today. You see, I have this particular affiliate website that I promote in the paid and organic search listings. The main “money page” is one of those typical review-style landing pages; it features five different products/services in the given market, including comparisons, personal experiences, pros & cons, etc.

This website has been online and profitable since January 2007, thanks to just one of the offers on that page. The others get a few conversions every now and then, but about 90% of the total revenue comes from just that one.

Note: Naturally, I tested landing pages that featured only the top converting offer by itself and/or along with one other decent performer. Having the other offers on there, even though people weren’t signing up for them, actually increased conversions.

Anyways, there was one other offer in the comparison that I really thought should be converting better than it was, which was about 0.2% (1/500). For all these months, I never did anything about it. Yesterday, however, I decided to do a search to see if I could find any other affiliate networks that carry the same offer. I found a few.

The Results Are In

The network that I settled on was none other than Commission Junction. I swapped my affiliate links from the other network for this merchant with the new links from CJ. After about a day of running with these new links, I have seen a decent amount of sales. My current total for the day, on this one offer, is ~$90 in commissions.

We can assume that this will be fairly consistent (if not underestimated) based on the performance of the other offers on this page. Additionally, there are still a few hours to go in the day (at the time of writing this), the merchant sets a 30-day cookie, and performance incentives up to a 100% increase (which I plan to achieve) are available.

Assuming that none of those revenue increasing facts come into play, and I only average $90/day on this offer, that is still an extra ~$2700/month. Just think of all the revenue I have lost by not testing from the beginning: 167 days (estimate) * $90 = $15,030 minimum!

Note: Since I am already sending traffic to this page regardless if this offer converts or not, any additional revenue gained from it is pure profit. The expenses remain constant whether it generates $0 or $300.

Lesson: Always Test

So the moral of the story is to always test the offers that you promote against others, even if they are the exact same merchant. You never know how much profit you are throwing away due to tracking issues.

Try to get as close to the advertiser as possible (going direct if they have their own affiliate program) so that you can get the benefit of superior tracking (less middlemen and redirects) and possibly the chance for max payouts.