What prevents incoming traffic converting to paying customers, 326 per 1 sale

[CreativeLeahG]

This has befuddled me for a while and I'm reaching out to other Zazzlers and the Zazzle team for some insight.

Since joining Zazzle, I have referred no less than  1,288,077 potential customers to Zazzle.

With 3,955 referrals I calculate I need 326 linkovers to generate 1 referral fee.  

Is that high? 

That's not including the ones I've directed via Ascend Pepperjam where my Impressions to Click through rates are insanely high.

This is great evidence that my self-marketing strategies are working! 

I am bringing the customers ... that's my part played!

So why isn't this traffic converting to paying customers and of course juicy referrals for me!

• Is it the price? 
• It can't be the designs, Zazzle have gone above and beyond to ensure the customers see every possible variant, highlighting the best of the best 
• Shipping?
• Reviews?

What are your thoughts?

My referrals via Zazzle are not reflective of the 800-1000 plus customers I deliver daily. So what is going wrong?

It could be that the traffic I bring already had a cookie (greedy eh!) and that's very possible, but I wonder how other Zazzlers with high linkover results fair with their referrals, are they reflective of the traffic you bring, better or worse than my own results?

ie. average 365 per 1 sale.

And before ya'll say it, it's not my designs because I refer MANY other designers as can be seen via my one of my websites - cheeky eh! And MOST of my links contain ref ID so I should get the referral whatever a customer buys on Zazzle ... phew!

I kindly invite you all to share your experiences and shed some light on this matter. Your insights and perspectives could help unravel this mystery and provide me or Zazzle (as once the traffic is here, what can we do?)  with valuable guidance to improve conversion rates.

Thank you all for your time and contributions. Let's continue to thrive and inspire one another as we navigate the exciting world of online entrepreneurship!

Dear Zazzle

I would like to make two requests

Bear in mind the above figures

1.For the Promoter Program which requires us to wave goodbye to the referral ID and chance to win a fee on another sellers product, can we have LESS of other sellers products on our pages? Or at least put own collections ABOVE the 'other designers'. 

2. Some reward system for those bringing a lot of traffic to Zazzle - perhaps allow us to join your blogging program, we got the lead on seo and marketing afterall!

Thank you for your consideration.

ps. If ZAZZLERS want to learn how I converted my promotions into traffic to Zazzle, join my course, I have a FREE offer running till the 11th July ... read my feedback so far! 

Zazzle - I'm sharing my knowledge to increase your traffic, let's work together to convert them into sales!

[ElizabethR]

One statistic is that direct marketing results in sales 2 to 3 percent of the time. So your referrals would be 25,600 to 38,400 if everyone looked only once and bought immediately. However, I would guess that invitations would get multiple looks and  linkovers before a customer buys.

The prior cookie is another issue.

My sister and I haven't been that active in promoting much of the time that we have been here. So we have 1,500 and 3,000 linkovers for every referral.

[CreativeLeahG]

What are your daily linkovers?

[ElizabethR]

Poor very poor!!! When we first started we got 30 to 40. We got 30s and teens for a few days a few days ago. Most of the time it is 0 to 2. We do occasional tweets and Pinterest. When we were doing all those affiliate Pinterest boards before we got chased off the forum, it didn't give us that many linkovers and no referrals.

[CreativeLeahG]

Note: I do NOT pay for advertising. I promote via blog/website, Facebook, Pinterest, other social media. All FREE outlets.

[PenguinPower]

Don't forget that up to about 50% of all web traffic is bots... while yes, Zazzle clearly has bot blockers, we've all had to find the squares with the motorcycles...  I doubt they can or even want to block *all* bot traffic, because web crawlers are the way one gets indexed in search engines. I don't know if analytics takes this into account and does not show you bot views... 

[CreativeLeahG]

These are not bots they are referral links

[InsideOut]

When I ran an affiliate site years ago where I was selling political items like bumper stickers, buttons, etc. I had numerous people write to me to say they like my stuff but couldn't see spending $5.99 (just checked - now $7.99) to ship a $5 bumper sticker. When I'd mention Zazzle Black (at the time) they'd usually reply that they had no interest in signing a contract and paying for something they may never use again.

So my feeling is and has always been that high shipping costs keep first time customers away, which I assume are a large percent of referrals. Years ago I suggested that Zazzle offer free shipping for new customers to introduce them to Zazzle and then hit them up for the "plus" service on their return. Since "plus" really seems to be designed for repeat customers and not first-timers who'd never heard of this company before I thought it would be a good solution, but nothing changed and affiliate sales were so few and far between I eventually had to give up and move on.

[CreativeLeahG]

That's very interesting, yes, I believe price and shipping could be a factor.

Maybe we need the sales notices to appear like a Pop Up rather than a discreet item in the corner?

[PacifierCity]

The rule of thumb that I was taught was 1 referral earning for every 1000 linkovers shown in our stats.  As I have not been promoting much over the last year + a little, shame on me... I can't really provide you with good info on this matter.  But 1 for every 300+ linkovers seems like a good average to me... thumbs up to you!

On a side note, there used to be days where my linkovers were throttled way up and the only thing I could figure was that P bots were checking links.  P held 90% of my referral efforts at the time.  So it was something they did as the stats on my websites did not match the traffic shown.

Thanks for reminding me that I need to get back to promoting again...

PC

............................

[Malissa]

Wow.  That seems like a really high ratio- 1000 views/1 referral?   With my meager marketing efforts I have a linkover ratio of 179 linkovers to 1 referral.  I did the math twice to make sure.  Makes me think I could do so much better if I really got serious about promotions and marketing and start affiliating again.

[CreativeLeahG]

How many linkovers do you get a day? (average)

I shared a ton of your items over the years (as you know) and never got a referral 😞   I hope you got the sales though!

[Malissa]

I can confirm that most (about 90%-ish) of my referrals do indeed come from Pinterest because most of my pins contain tracking info (that shows in my referral history) down to what board they came in from and the date the pin was created. The others are clean self referral links from being in the promoter program.  

[CreativeLeahG]

You don't want to share how many linkovers a day? That would be valuable information in determining the reward to effort ratio re pinning.

[CreativeLeahG]

How many linkovers do you get a day?

[CreativeLeahG]

Note if members commenting could share their linkover rates per day that would be helpful.

Reason being I know many of you are pretty much all focused on pins and some have great views. Hence it would be interesting to learn if those pins are the likely cause of your linkovers and if the number of linkovers is reflective of pin views for the month. I am pondering this because I'm pretty sure my linkovers have very little to do with Pinterest.

Also if you can share average number of referrals per day/week.

I know from a private communication another member who while their linkovers are 1/10th of mine, on average the referral rate is about the same as mine. Which I found interesting. Rule of thumb for conversions is between 0.3-0.5%.  Which I'd forgotten about when I posted this thread. So I suppose the figures do add up. But still .... 

Please share your figs, so we can get some clarity re this. Thank you.

[WHS_Designs]

@CreativeLeahG 

Hi Leah,

After hitting personal linkover highs on May 31 and June 1 (247 and 252), my daily linkovers have been anywhere from 60-150 a day (they have dropped recently!) Since joining the Promoter 2.0 program in mid-April 2023, I have averaged about 9 referrals per month (and all but 2 are self-referrals). 

Previous to joining the Promoter 2.0 program, I have always promoted on Pinterest (within the past 6 months, I have done almost exclusively manual Pins) but found it hard to get referrals (for myself or other designers) ... 10 referrals A YEAR was the high water mark for me.

ETA: monthly Pinterest views: 5,700 (and I'm not sure you've noticed this, but refreshing one's own Pinterest page adds to the count for each Pin!)

Hope this information helps you.

Hui

[CreativeLeahG]

Very helpful thankyou Hui!

[CreativeLeahG]

I forgot another important point

Almost 100% of my current referrals are promoter (35%) so it's my own products not those of other designers that are selling, despite my promoting a great deal of them. This I find unusual. Does Pinterest strip off the code?

[CreativeLeahG]

I would love to have more insights as to those 3rd party referrals.

I just noticed my headline

326 linkovers does 'not' = 1 sale 🤣 Oh boy.

I shall perhaps get on board with Google Analytics and see if I can shed light on it some more. 

Thank you all for contributing what you were willing to. 

[CreativeLeahG]

Not sure why I didn't look at this before, but this is pretty conclusive my 1000+ linkovers a day are not via Pinterest, the stats here are for a 30-day period.

I also noticed that images shared via my own websites, gain a LOT more views on Pinterest than when shared via Zazzle or even 'created' on Pinterest. 

[ClareS]

== I also noticed that images shared via my own websites, gain a LOT more views on Pinterest than when shared via Zazzle or even 'created' on Pinterest. ==

Are you using the same style images for both? I can always drive way more traffic and get more views with "lifestyle" type pins - ie 10 Best Bridal Shower themes for 2023 - or 20 Best Baby Shower Mocktails - that point to my blog than with a straight up product link to Zazzle - even if I add text and a "mockup". 

Of course writing the blog post and making those pins takes longer than just straight up pinning the product so I do more of the latter - and hope that the quantity will convert over time!

[CreativeLeahG]

That might work better, but re my site they can be images pulled from Zazzle or ones I've created. They do all have alt text (generally) that might help.

[ClareS]

Leah -= here are my linkovers for the same period as yours. Obvs these are links with RF which mean they are mainly to other people's products - I have recently upped my third-party promotional activity via Pinterest but have been very lax in this previously. For that period - where I sent almost 6000 people to Zazzle I have ZERO third-party referrals. I very rarely see them at all. If a 1% conversion is good then I should see at least 60 referrals...

I pin ALL of my products to Pinterest as a clean link to get the 35% referral. For that same period, I had 48 self-referred PP2.0 referrals. I don't know how many people I had to send to Zazzle to achieve those though. That's the downside of having to use a "clean link" - you have no idea whether your promotional efforts are paying off as you can't track them. The upside is that if Zazzle visitors pin our product - or share it with friends we still get the referral. 

If I check my Google Analytics I've had 17,992 visitors to my store and products pages for that period, and it's resulted in 753 checkouts. That's a 4% conversion. Of that 8200 came from Zazzle's PAID marketing efforts (thank you Zazzle) and another 8000 are "blind" as in Google puts them in Direct because it can't tell me (people who click a link on pinterest who aren't logged in appear in GA as Direct not via Pinterest). Only 57 people came via Pinterest (which is surprisingly few given how many times I pin my products! - but again they could be lumped in with direct)

Interestingly Pinterest traffic is supposedly the highest conversion at 6% so the 6000 links I sent over should have resulted in nearer to 360 referrals! 

It does suggest that the inkover data is flawed and potentially filled with bots following the links

[CreativeLeahG]

Great feedback thank you Clare! 

Perhaps Zazzle can weigh in on this 'bot' issue, I'm assuming they have ways to filter those out from results.

Meanwhile ... since joining the promoter program my 15% referrals also died a death, which is weird as MOST of my shares still have the code including news created since. I am wondering if the sites we are sharing to, strip the codes somehow?

[ClareS]

I know for a long time Pinterest did strip links because they didn't want people using it for affiliate traffic - but then they changed it back and that was a couple of years ago. We can see those links are working - because we're getting the linkovers and my understanding was they were only links with RF codes on. The question really is as you asked - why are they not converting to sales. 

[PAZP]

This too is frustrating for me @ClareS . "I pin ALL of my products to Pinterest as a clean link to get the 35% referral. ...That's the downside of having to use a "clean link" - you have no idea whether your promotional efforts are paying off as you can't track them. The upside is that if Zazzle visitors pin our product - or share it with friends we still get the referral."

[Rebeccazazzle]

I think that price could be part of the problem. One example is the phone case; phone cases are usually much less expensive on other site or the casaes that have a price as high as Zazzle's are elaborate with actual design elements glued to the case.

[ameliacarrie]

 On average for every 375 linkovers I get a referral.