help experienced affiliates- traffic leakage
 

Hi guys,

I am approaching my first year into the biz and I still have ALOT to learn.

I was doing some spring cleaning on an old site adding new sponsors and galleries and killing the bad ones. The setup on this site is Smart Thumbs driven and it counts the clickthroughs for each sponsor. I have noticed that with many of my sponsors the clicks were in the hundreds of thousands yet the sponsors stats only credit me with a few thousand clicks(less than 10K). I realize that some sponsors only count uniques while some count join pages, but these numbers seem really, really low.

One sponsor had 293k clicks according to ST, but the sponsor only claims to have received 2,400 uniques. I can tell you with certainty that my production is not 10,000%. Is this a product of shaving, zango, or faulty programming?

Needless to say, everyone of these low ratio sponsors had shit for sales. I would love to hear from experienced people if this is a standard or if I am getting screwed.

Some tgp listings I have seen over 600k hits with under 10,000 clickthroughs to the sponsor.. It's not out of the ordinary, especially if your sales text sucks.

PS: If this is happening with multiple sponsors,
You should know that everything is fine

Thanks MrMaxwell. This is a problem with 3 out of 8 sponsors. So I am dropping those sponsors and adding ones that perform well with some of my other sites.

Some sponsors naturally will have more clickthroughs to the sponsor page itself.. They can vary wildly.
And as you said, some sponsors only count join page hits, some count all clickthroughs, etc.

What really matters is the actual conversion ratio.
The conversion, the true converstion ratio to me is:

Actual hits to site / signups

(Not just clickthroughs to sponsor / signups)


The hits to site / clickthroughs to sponsor figure is useful in determining how well your sales text is performing and hell well matched your traffic is to the content

Points all well taken, MrMaxwell.

Poorly designed galleries and content unrelated to the site have more to do with bad ratios than zango and shaving.

On a related note, ccbill ratios are abysmal for me. Anyone else experience this too?

CCBill is a good company, I haven't got alot of experience with them, I've heard that the program owner can shave off some of your rebills but I am not sure.

Sounds like your click thru rations are off, im assuming - try switching the tours and links around. Keep changing till you find what works...