FAQs: What Traffic Source Drives The Most Affiliate Marketing Sales?
Not all traffic is created as equal, and finding out what source drives the most sales is something to really delve into. In this article, we highlight the top traffic sources, what drives the most sales and which have the highest conversion rate in the UK's affiliate marketing industry.
What drives the most affiliate marketing sales in the UK?
In the below table, we look at the top traffic sources for driving the most affiliate marketing sales in the UK. We'll also look into the top sectors and what drives the most traffic for those sectors.
| Source Type | Percentage of Sales |
|---|---|
| Organic Search | 30% |
| Social Media | 25% |
| Facebook Posts | 10% |
| Instagram Posts | 8% |
| Facebook Stories | 4% |
| Instagram Stories | 3% |
| Twitter Posts | 0.5% |
| LinkedIn Posts | 0.5% |
| Other Social Media Posts | 0% |
| Email Marketing | 20% |
| Influencers | 15% |
| Instagram Influencers | 7% |
| YouTube Influencers | 5% |
| Facebook Influencers | 2% |
| Twitter Influencers | 0.5% |
| TikTok Influencers | 0.5% |
| Other Influencers | 0% |
| Paid Advertising | 10% |
| Pay-per-click (PPC) Ads | 4% |
| Display Ads | 3% |
| Social Media Ads | 2% |
| Native Advertising | 1% |
As we can see, Organic Search drives the highest percentage of traffic for Affiliate Marketing Sales. Organic Search traffic is seen as highly dependable and trustworthy, due to their non-biased view on all reviews.
What is Organic Search Traffic in Affiliate Marketing?
In marketing terms, Organic Search Traffic refers to the visitors who arrive at your website or content through search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This type of traffic is considered "organic" because it is earned through natural search engine rankings, rather than paid advertising or other promotional efforts.
However, in Affiliate Marketing terms, Organic Search Traffic refers to the referring websites which have a huge emphasis on generating their own Organic Search Traffic. These sites are primarily review sites that either buy your product (or are gifted products by you or a retailer) and then write an unbiased review on the product, linking to your site via affiliate marketing links.
Can Affiliate Marketing improve my own Search Engine Performance?
Working with Organic Search Traffic focused affiliates not only increases your sales volume online, but can also improve your Search Engine Performance through what Google, Yahoo and Bing see as 'powerful votes of confidence' or, Backlinks.
According to Google: Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, or simply links, are links from other websites that point to your website or content. They are a key factor in search engine algorithms and are viewed as "votes of confidence" from other websites, indicating that your content is valuable and relevant. Backlinks can help to increase your website's authority and trustworthiness, improve your search engine performance, and drive referral traffic to your website from other sites.
Simply put: backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website or content. But, why are they important? Surely people just reading your content and enjoying it is the key to higher ranking pages? Not quite. To explain, we need to go back to the beginning, and understand how search engines determine what's worthy of ranking highly and how every page is reviewed.
The internet is full of crawlers, bots and spiders
Huh? What the hell are crawlers, bots and spiders? Well, they're not as creepy as you may think, and they help search engines index what's important and relevant to people searching on the internet.
Imagine you've just published an article, like this. You researched, wrote, re-wrote it again and you're really proud of what you've created...but it gets no traffic. Surely all your hours of hard work should equate to getting loads of views and comments on it from your peers? Well, not exactly.
Much like any website, you need promotion to gain inbound traffic. The more promotion you give a page, the more inbound traffic it should receive, and the more inbound traffic it receives, the more promotion it gains. It's like a circle.
In theory, the more external links you have pointing to your site, the more times it will be crawled (indexed) and the higher it should start to rank and the more Organic Search Traffic it will gain. Of course, there are other rules here which we'll dive into, such as content validity and trustworthiness.
So, how do you get inbound traffic? Simply put: by working with affiliates or other reputable website owners to publish links to your site on their own website, with unique content and or reviews.
Everything is intertwined and content is king
Every domain (website) has its own ranking on Google, and every page on that domain is ranked (indexed) separately and given its own score to determine its validly, content and readability for the user. Basically, make your website is easy to use and full of great content that isn't stolen from other websites, and Google will thank you for it.
Right, that bit is simple enough. Now the fun stuff.
Now imagine every other link that points to every one of your pages has the exact the same scoring system. BUT, every other page which links to that page which then links to your page, and so on and so forth, has its own rank, too. We find imagining it like a family tree helps. It goes on forever.
The reason for explaining this? The more highly ranked websites and backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more times your site is then indexed by crawlers, bots and spiders.
Long story short (conclusion)
In conclusion, we recommend following the below best practices:
Work with affiliates to promote your products. Not only will this increase your chances of gaining sales through an affiliate channel, but it also helps to improve your Search Engine Performance through relevant, trustworthy backlinks.
Choose the right affiliates to work with. Do your research into website owners performance and whether they fit within your niche. Don't just work with anyone who says they can provide you links. Get solid data from them and request past performance statistics.
Instead of paying up front for links, choose to work with them on an affiliate deal or content swap alongside an affiliate deal. Building relationships is key with affiliate marketing, and if you can work on a deal where you guest post on their site and provide each other affiliate links, you both win.