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The game of conversion: what really works

As you know, your website’s conversion rate is essential to your income as an affiliate. The conversion rate, defined as the number of goals/actions completed divided by the number of visits to your site, is a key metric of your site’s success.

If you’re a casino affiliate marketer, this is an important term to be aware of. Your conversion rate can make all the difference between a site that’s an average performer versus a high performer. If you want to improve your earnings, it’s much easier to improve your conversion rate than it is to build and drive traffic to a new site.

In fact, the need to improve conversions is not limited to casino affiliate marketers. There’s no affiliate marketing site, in any niche, that doesn’t benefit from a higher conversion rate. If you’re selling ClickBank products, you make more money when you sell more products. And if you’re earning commission from online casinos, the more players you convert, the more money you make.

The challenge is finding an effective method to improve your conversion rate. The answers differ among the experts.

According to Gian Perroni, Affiliate Director of Fairway Casino, live gaming is a great way to drive conversions:

I think the most important thing for affiliates to understand is that with a proper live gaming casino and a good software provider, you should see higher conversions, significantly higher conversions and you should see better player retention which, of course, translates into higher lifetime value from players.

On the other hand, affiliate guru Mark Ling suggests that bonuses can lead to high conversion rates:

For affiliate marketers, offering a special bonus in your ad copy or landing page can be a good way to increase your conversion rate, particularly if the bonus is more valuable than the product itself!

Ling continues about how effective bonuses satisfy a need of your customer:

Good bonuses obviously need to be something that the person interested in buying the target product will want. For example, if you are promoting a dog training book, then a bonus book on stopping dog aggression or dog health would be a good bonus.

The best bonuses are more valuable than the actual product! A great question to consider when you’re brainstorming ideas is “What can I offer the market that’s even more exciting than the product itself?”

We know that Ling’s advice also applies to casino affiliate marketing. Streak Gaming’s network of online gambling affiliate sites offers generous bonuses to players, and gets terrific conversions as a result.

But overall, you’re not going to succeed in converting visitors without a great website. According to this Hub Spot blog post, visitors sat the most important factor in a website’s design is “the website makes it easy for me to find what I want.” Knowing that, you should focus on ease of use and make it easy for your visitors to find your affiliate offer and start playing.

You’ll also want to select great offers for your website. In this poll on the CAP forum, Playtech and Microgaming software was voted as having the highest conversion rate by the casino affiliate webmaster on our forums.

Finally, nothing is going to help your conversion rate if you’re sending players into a site they can’t read because of language differences, or if you’re trying to sell them on a casino that doesn’t allow players from their country. When you geo-target your sites to accommodate for languages and legal restrictions, your conversions will certainly improve. (If you’re looking for instructions on how to geo-target a WordPress site, check here.)

Improving your conversion rate requires a consistent amount of monitoring and tweaking. But if you make good decisions, and make sure your sending traffic that can take advantage of your offers, you’ll improve your conversions and the income from your sites.

Have you struggled with the conversion rates on your sites? What did you do to improve them? Let us know in the comments below!