Tips to Generate Sales, Improve Conversion Ratios

In recent years the proliferation of free porn and advancement of traffic brokerage platforms has made acquiring traffic significantly easier than it was in the past. However, as any successful webmaster can tell you, a million uniques with zero sales is actually worse than a zero uniques with zero sales because non-converting traffic creates overhead and only becomes valuable when it reaches monetary conversion through one method or another. For that reason, the old debate about whether traffic or content was king may actually have reached a new phase where everyone can agree that conversion is actually king. How do you improve conversion ratios on new and existing traffic sources? That’s this month’s burning question! “Learn as much as you can about your visitors,” said Crak Jason, the vice president of marketing for CrakRevenue. “Learn where they live through GEO-IP location. Learn where they came from through referral tracking. Learn if they’ve visited your site before or are new through retargeting. If they’re not ready to buy yet, learn if they still want more information by offering to mail them updates. In today’s market, there are a plethora of ways to learn more about your visitor and, in turn, deliver the best possible user experience for them. This builds trust in your brand and makes for an easy transition from visitor to customer.” Many webmasters echoed the notion that tracking and putting real-time data to use in campaigns is crucial to maximizing conversions, but with so many data points to be tracked, dealing with the quantity and quality of data available also becomes a challenge for site owners to overcome. “A lot of people talk about tracking being important, but tracking everything leads to data overload,” said Michael of ZTOD.com. “It’s important to focus in on the data that matters most. I’d suggest looking at the number of your join form submits and analyzing that against the number of submits you have to billers as a starting point. Then remove duplicate submits by IP etc. ... because join submits are the biggest trend that you can track to see if a conversion problem is due to your site or if it’s your biller creating the bottleneck. If your join submits are steady or in a range daily and your joins are fluctuating wildly, you need to mix in a secondary processor like Segpay—then get an idea for the actual submits on your site submit forms to joins through their forms for comparison. Conversions are as much about efficient processing as anything else, and analyzing the data of those transactions is essential to maximizing your ratios on traffic to your site regardless of the source.” Getting right to the point and determining what actually matters as opposed to having semantic debates is essential. “People like to have philosophical debates about what might work or what might not, but at ManicaMedia we base our decisions on statistical evidence and qualitative tracking,” said Erwin of ManicaMedia.com. “What we have found out may seem a bit obvious, but for us it’s a combination of relatively straightforward factors, including the country where the traffic originates and customer types (type-in, tube, SEO, etc.) being properly matched to the best billing options and carefully optimized landing pages. When you get that equation balanced, you get great conversions—but we find that many people either lack the expertise or are unwilling to invest the resources necessary to fine-tune their pitch and define their client pool sufficiently. That’s why many find this kind of advice unhelpful, even though in reality, based on our experience, in the end this is all that really matters.” The value of going local and providing a sales pitch that fits the expectations of your audience is something that has been studied exhaustively at this point. According to reports published by Common Sense Advisory, your target market want to do business with the company that is easiest to communicate with, and only 10 percent of web users with poor English language skills say they are willing to purchase products or services from a website that is only available in English. More than 60 percent of non-native English-speaking people who do read English still prefer buying from websites in their native language. The fact is, we live in a multilingual world no matter how local you “think” your site may be. “Having a multilingual website strongly helps to turn your visitors into customers,” said Colin from TranslationsXXX.com. “Web users are four times more likely to buy from a site that communicates in their native language. If your website is only available in English you are neglecting more than 1.4 billion potential consumers who access the internet in a language other than English. Nearly 90 percent of web users who have little to no knowledge of English spend most, if not all, of their time on websites in their native language. By simply having your website available in English, Chinese and Spanish you can reach almost 40 percent of the world’s population instead of limiting your audience with unnecessary language barriers.” Clearly content has a role to play beyond the language of the tour text. “It’s gotta be content over design,” said Buck, owner of the Sicamarie.com solo girl site. “I hate to say that, as I’m a designer, but a pretty design won’t make the traffic convert. The hottest pics that appeal to the target audience’s perversions are what’s gonna bring it. That’s why we are so focused on producing boutique niche market sites with girls exclusive to our brand. Nothing will ever convert quite as well as a gorgeous girl that the visitor has never seen before and can’t find anywhere else.” Carrying your message as a continuing thread throughout your entire campaign is also an important factor to consider. “One of the most important things about converting your website visitors into real money is the consistency of your marketing message throughout the user flow, off and on your website,” said Lutz Obermann, vice president sales and marketing Europe for DatingFactory.com. “Right from the moment a user first sees your ad on a third-party site, the message should contain a clear call-to-action that is repeated on the subsequent landing page and describes the product you want to sell accurately, vividly and emotionally. Tricking the user into clicking an ad, visiting a site and buying a product under false pretenses (e.g. with fake windows prompt ads, providing inaccurate information about the purpose of the landing page or over-promising of what your product is delivering) will always result in a damaged relationship. Keep the copy on your ads, landing page and product aligned so that user finds what he is looking for, and conversions, lifetime value and customer satisfaction will increase dramatically.” It is worth underscoring the importance of ethical, honest sales efforts in improving conversions and strengthening brand loyalty. “For Homegrown Video, honesty is the best policy when it comes to converting a visitor to a customer,” said Farrell Timlake, president of Homegrown Video. “Naturally, images will speak for themselves if a picture is worth a thousand words, but these days everyone is doing ‘tube style’ tours and visitors view most typical tour text as a big whitewash of superlatives and hyperbole. The true lesson of amateur porn is that being real and sincere is best. Not everything needs to be “the most amazing unbelievable blah blah blah.” For example, at Homegrown, with the authentic submittals we get, not everyone is going to be a beauty queen, or shoot with the best lighting or sound, etc. We let people know up front what to expect. We say if the energy and passion is there even if the camera quality is not. We don’t try to turn everyone into goddesses and super studs, instead letting the reality speak for itself. It must be working because Homegrown definitely continues to convert well.” Taking a long-term view can also open your eyes to bigger rewards. “Too many people think about conversion ratios only on the basis of today or this week,” said Rasmus, owner of PornCastle.com. “Improving ratios is also a long-term goal and at PornCastle we do our very best to stay clear of programs that ‘screw our traffic,’ because frankly no PPS offer is worth doing that. That business model doesn’t match our way of thinking, and we’re here to give surfers a safe platform to enjoy good clean porn sites. It’s not always easy to draw the line, but there are many clear-cut cases, and as a true porn lover myself, it’s easy for me to look at the industry from my clients’ perspective. Help build a better industry and all of our conversation ratios will improve over time as a direct result.” As Rasmus went on to point out, “There is always talk about bad ratios in the adult community, and some even say good ratios are a thing of the past, but at PornCastle we don’t believe that to be true. There is no denying that piracy and the tubes have made their mark. Sure they have. Along with file lockers, shady billing, card banging and so on. That does mean it takes a lot more hard work to start out than it did 10 years ago, but getting trust from your visitors can still be done. Build a good site, be honest and forget the quick buck. We are one of the many affiliates who refuse to work with sites, programs, or affiliates of bad companies—even if they convert and offer a good PPS payout. That won’t make it 2001 again, but it is a large step in the right direction.” This article originally ran in the October 2013 issue of AVN magazine.