Optimizing affiliate CTAs

Every time you place an affiliate link to a partner's website, you can earn money if your visitors take an action on that site using your link. However, to be sure of maximizing your earnings, it's important to know how to place these links correctly.

What is a CTA and why is it important?

The CTA, or "Call to Action", is a graphic element that calls to be clicked. In the field of affiliation, its role is crucial, as it's the starting point for generating revenue: it invites your audience to visit the website of one of your partners.

How can you optimize your CTAs to generate more revenue?

To optimize your CTAs and generate better affiliate revenues, it's important not to neglect the placement and promotion of these affiliate links. If you've ever studied the marketing mix, you're probably familiar with the 4P rule: price, placement, packaging and promotion. This rule also applies to CTAs! Think of them as in-store products, and make sure your visitors notice them and click on them. Here are a few things to bear in mind to achieve this.

Check your CTAs

It's important to check your affiliate links regularly to make sure they're working properly and leading to the target pages. Test your links before publishing them online, and don't hesitate to check them regularly, especially if you're placing them statically by hand. Advertisers may change affiliation platforms, or product pages on merchant sites may be updated or disappear. This can lead to the need to migrate your links, a tedious but necessary task.

Choose their location carefully

The placement of your affiliate links is also important. You don't have to put them everywhere, lest you appear too commercially aggressive, but you do have to make them accessible in the right places. The most obvious is to place a link at the bottom of your article. On a desktop site, you can imagine a cartouche in a column that descends as the visitor scrolls down the web page. In some cases, however, it may be a good idea to place links at the top of the page, for example if you offer a summary of your article that covers the key elements of the product.

Create deep links

Deep links can be your best friends in affiliate marketing. As mentioned in our article on affiliate commission rates, some advertisers have no digital marketing skills whatsoever and therefore rely entirely on you to promote their products. Often, these advertisers will provide you with links that redirect to their home page, but it's more effective for conversion to reduce the number of clicks to the shopping cart by redirecting to product pages. If these pages are in English, don't hesitate to force them to be in French.

Deep link generators are available on all affiliate platforms, but some advertisers do not activate them. If you are having difficulty finding deep links for a particular advertiser, please contact your account manager, who will be able to help you. If the advertiser has a wide variety of products, it may be impossible to find the links for each product on the platforms. To make things easier for affiliates, many advertisers provide catalog files in CSV or XML format.

Provide complete information

It's important to communicate clear information to your visitors in CTAs. When describing the benefits of a product, three pieces of information can be useful to your visitors: price, shipping costs and merchant name. A fourth piece of information can be useful if you don't overuse it: crossed-out prices indicating a promotion. These prices can trigger clicks, but they're a double-edged sword: promotions don't last forever, and you'll have to change the price later.

By providing this information, you avoid disappointing your audience when they arrive at the target page. By not displaying them, you may generate more clicks, but it's no use if people don't go on to purchase because they're missing one of the key pieces of information. As always, it's important to be honest with your visitors and prioritize the quality of clicks that convert over the quantity of clicks that don't generate commissions.

Choose the right type of CTA

The type of affiliate link can also influence the effectiveness of your CTAs. A highlighted text link is a good start, but buttons are generally more effective, especially on mobile where it can be harder to click on a text link. If you're not comfortable with code, you can use a customizable button generator to adapt the buttons to your site's colors.

Price comparison can also be an asset in generating clicks. If you only offer one price, chances are your visitors will go and compare prices elsewhere themselves. Price comparison sites therefore benefit free of charge from the content you write. To avoid this, it's best to offer several links to different merchants whenever possible, using a price comparison table for example.

Display up-to-date data

Keeping your CTA data up to date can be tricky. To keep your prices up to date, you need to generate your links dynamically. While some advertisers used to provide widgets for this purpose, this is no longer the case today, and you'll need to develop solutions to keep your data up to date. Affiliation platforms all offer data feeds, product catalogs or APIs to automate data retrieval, but this requires a human and/or financial investment to set up these developments. Affilizz offers widgets to simplify these tasks.