Is anyone else looking at their linkover history and wondering where their referral fees are? I have no idea what the average number of link clicks is for a shop owner, but I’m getting around 700 clicks on the different referral links I’ve created to my shop and to other shop’s products. One day I had over 4K clicks and do you know how many sales/referral fees I got that day - zero. It doesn’t make sense and like everyone else, all my sales say 3rd party, even though I’m blogging and pinning and sharing on socials with direct links to my shops.
I’m happy to see the numbers going up for people actually clicking on the links I’m creating, but where are the referral dollars. I have a hard time believe over 4k people clicked - in one day - on links I created directed them to shop on Zazzle and I didn’t make one referral sale.
Is anyone else in the same boat and wondering what more they can do to succeed here?
Linkovers are more or likely bots from Singapore (who don’t have a wallet unfortunately). There’s not much you can do about them. Have a search of the forum for “singapore”
Could be real people browsing the site but we’ll never really know until you get a sale.
Money is tight for a lot of people so brace yourself for a lean season
That’s disappointing to even think they could be all bots, given the amount of time I’ve spent creating pins and blog posts and sharing. I mean, sure, bots happen - but over 4K traffic in 1 day, from links I created should have brought in a few sales or referrals.
@GreenCarbonMail@Sara_H I hardly ever look at the linkover history because to me those are just meaningless numbers with no additional information. I never have figured out how I can see individual links to a product I promote.
I also sell very little (usually less than a handful items per month) and hardly promote anymore compare to when I started out two years ago but I do get both kinds of referrals and even had a couple None sales too. I just made a referral yesterday for a t-shirt I had created two nights ago but if I had not sent out that link in the same night I would not have known where the referral came from because the item wasn’t even indexed on Zazzle at that time.
On a site note: I give out business cards in real life and most referrals I get come from that (people tell me what they want and I try to create it on Zazzle) and not from Social Media. At least for me. But again I’m small potato material, I haven’t even made Bronze yet after two full years of trying kind of hard, lol.
I doubt the 70k is accurate, but I don’t know how these things are counted. If my links actually brought in 70k hits then my conversion rate is horrific!! 😂
That’s what I was thinking - not about your conversion rate but what Zazzle is reporting to us. I thought 4K hits in a day was weird not to make even one sale, but 70K in a day - you should be making 100+ sales a day if we go by that sales/marketing wisdom of having to “touch” a customer 10X before they make a purchase - unless they are actively looking for your product.
I’ve always thought the Link-Over stats were useless (though I have a suspicion they may be one of the zRank variables).
Over time I’ve seen people report crazy high link-over numbers, and then there are spikes where everyone is seeing unusually high numbers. My theory is that these spikes are due to bot activity targeted to crawling Pinterest, maybe also even from Pinterest themselves to evaluate link quality or collect whatever stats. If one has been on Zazzle for a while they could easily have hundreds or even thousands of pins. Add re-pins, saves, and other people directly pinning your stuff, including Zazzle, and then bots following those links to crawl more stuff at /storename, I could see how link-over numbers explode.
Also, I have recently seen first-hand by sharing links on FB to a platform that updates views in real-time, that immediately after posting, before anyone possibly could have even seen the post, that views go up 10-15. This leads me to believe that FB has behindthescenes bots checking link content as soon as you hit Publish.
Who knows what other SM platforms might be doing to monitor content and review links. This is all just my theory, but I think that the more prolific one is with promoting, the more bot activity introduced into the link-over stats.
If you connect your store to Google Analytics, you will notice that some incoming links spent less than one or two seconds on this link. This means they are bots, and their numbers seem to be increasing.