Mark runs a niche affiliate site targeting people looking to buy DAB Digital Radios.  At the time of writing, Mark has made a few changes since submission, but most of the pointers in the Docs reviews still hold true.  Mark asks:

“I’m completely stumped as to why my site isn’t making any conversions and I wondered if you guys would mind having a look to see if there’s anything I’m missing.

Website address – http://www.digioutput.co.uk/

The site is a PPC comparison site that (at the time of writing) has only been live for about a week, so I’m quite happy to sit on this for a little while as it’s not costing me all that much. However, I’m mystified as to why I’m not making any conversions.

Over the past week I’ve had 18,500 impressions, and out of that I’ve had 309 clicks (CTR 1.66% – not great, but not disastrous) and out of those 309 clicks I’ve made precisely 0 sales (and I’ve checked the links are working as they should be)!!

I’m reasonably sure my site isn’t crap as I have analytics running on it and it says my bounce rate is reasonably low – 34%, and the average time on site is actually quite high at 2min 46secs. On average each user looks at 5.35 pages and I have almost 90% new visitors … so I just can’t figure out what my problem is? I’ve been creating new content by writing news articles and adding additional pages, but since the site is only a week old, I guess all the content is pretty new.

I know the site’s only been live for a week, but I’m clearly attracting custom to it, but absolutely no one is generating any sales. I’m desperate for some help please Affiliate Doctors, this is driving me up the wall, there must be a solution! Have I just signed up to rubbish merchants?

Very much looking forward to your reply.

Mark”

Here’s what Mark, Elaine and Dan had to say …

Mark Boyd

Hi Mark, thanks for submitting your site to the doctors, I’ve got a few points which will hopefully help you increase your sales figures.

PRICE COMPARISON

The first thing that strikes me when looking at the product pages, is the lack of “price comparison”. Take a look @ http://www.digioutput.co.uk/product/3/Micro1112%20DAB/Goodmans-Micro1112-Dab.html for example, it shows the price from Bennetts, which may well be the best price, but how does your visitor know that unless you show them? You should bear in mind it’s not always about price, there are other factors that come into play when buying online, such as the consumers previous dealings with the company, returns policys, p&p costs etc.. So if I were you, I’d focus on adding as many prices to each product page as possible. You appear to be using ECU, so this should be relatively easy for you.
 
BUY NOW BUTTONS

I’d also have a look at some of the other buy now buttons that ECU have on offer, I personally prefer the buttons like http://www.easycontentunits.com/images/r-sn.png and I’ve found with a bit of A-B testing that they convert visitors to clickers very well! So, maybe give different buttons and colours of buttons a try and find out what works for you.

(buttons updated since review)

CONTENT

Not only does content help to improve your organic listings, it helps give the reader an idea of the quality of the site. If you’ve taken the time to handwrite 100’s of articles for the site, this hard work will be transferred to the consumer in terms of their perceived trust of the site. Again, looking at the Goodmans example, I’d immediately click away from that page and find a site that had taken the time to write a description.

I believe if you focus on those three things, getting them perfected, you’ll see an increase in your sales.

Best of luck!

Elaine

I’ve had quite a good look round your site, Mark, and there’s a ton of stuff you can fix, which will hopefully increase your sales.

1. Why all the review this, review that – I might want to send in a review after I’ve bought something, but not before – I do find it off putting.

2. At first glance it doesn’t  look like a price comparison site – I would expect 1 image and description and then a choice of merchants – it took me a while to detect that some of the products were actually the same – lots of images are missing which makes  it quite confusing.

3. The product images are quite small – I have found that the best converting sites have large images – so you can see exactly what you’re buying.

4. I’d prefer better descriptions or bullet points on the first page rather than have to click through all the products to discover the type I’m looking for – e.g.  I like a few preset buttons so I don’t have to keep retuning.

5. On the home page I’d put the best selling products at the top, with better images and descriptions and keep the blurb at the bottom or remove it.

6. The Digital Coverage page is a tad sparse, the link to the BBC site doesn’t work and the map doesn’t tell my anything!

7. The Radio Stations page is, again, a tad sparse, and the BBC link goes through to the wrong page, so I can’t find out which stations I can receive!

8. And the Why Dab page appears to be in Arabic!

To summarise – I’d spend a while cleaning up the site and providing good quality information without relying on third party sites – or at least ensure the links direct properly. Get rid of the request for reviews and the Add to my saved list – I can’t see that they serve a purpose.  Ensure all the images are available, make them bigger and produce better descriptions.

At the moment it doesn’t look very professional and instill confidence to buy, but with a bit of work I’m sure you’ll get there.

Dan

hi, Mark, how are you?

I like the niche (dab radios). And it looks like you’re using affilistore, which is an ok affiliate price comparison platform. I think there are a few things you could do to improve things if you’re willing to stick with it.

Here are some ideas:

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

1. The first introduction to the theme of the site (DAB radios) is 700 pixels down the homepage. I’d put that right up top, e.g. changing your tagline “doing the searching so you don’t have to” to “We’ve found the best DAB Radios so you don’t have to”.

2. The homepage is largely taken up by a single graphic, which doesn’t really lead anywhere. I’d switch that to a smaller graphic, and link it through to the product page of the particular radio.

3. Product recommendations from 3 different sources are then crammed into a messy area at the bottom of the homepage (from amazon, an affiliate window content unit, and an affilistore content unit). I’d clean that area up & focus on one unit at a time. Figure out which works the best & stick with that until things are working.

4. A simple fix to your search box would be to change the text to ‘Search for DAB Radios here…’ instead of just ‘Search for products here…’

DEAD ENDS

The site is full of little dead ends. An easy way to get rid of these is to click through it asking yourself the question “if I was a visitor, would clicking that link have moved me closer to a purchase, or closer to abandoning the site?”

Here are 2 examples:

1. The top navigation is a series of 4 dead ends. Once a visitor clicks on any one of them, they are presented with a page that takes them away from purchasing anything, rather than toward it.

2. If you’re happy dabbling with the affilistore code, you may want to remove the ‘+ Add to my saved list’ and ‘Review this store’ and ‘Review this product’ links from category pages. These are red herrings that visitors won’t use, at the same time if anyone does click on them, the resulting pages are quite confusing.

PRODUCT SELECTION

On a site like this, the primary function is to help visitors move toward a product selection, and then to click through to the merchant site. Here are a few observations on how you could improve that:

1. The product selection is very broad. There are 17 categories, only 2 of them devoted to the products you’re trying to sell. (and those are buried in positions 15 & 16).

2. In your 2 target categories (‘Portable Radios’ & ‘Radios’), there are 900 products. It’s very difficult to dig through these and, other than brand and price, no reason to click on any one of them. The default sorting seems to be ‘low price to high’, meaning visitors are presented with really cheap radios & left to find anything decent themselves.

3. Your Brand categories are alphabetical, but crammed together with no line breaks. I’d separate those to 1 per line and add the words ‘DAB Radios’ to the end of each (‘Cowon DAB Radios’ rather than just ‘Cowon’ for example). That will look repetitive, but is more helpful to someone landing on the page for the first time, and better for search engine rankings.

COMPARISON PAGES

The pages that should convert for you are your individual product pages (comparing the price of an individual product at various merchants). Here’s an example page & some thoughts:

http://www.digioutput.co.uk/product/7/16893/Pure-One-Mini-Black.html

1. The first ‘add to cart’ button on your product pages is *way* down the page. (off screen if you’re browsing on my laptop – in fact the first price is off the screen).

2. The top product is the one you’re trying to get the visitor to click through on, yet there’s nothing to indicate that. Putting it in a box with ‘Our Recommendation’ (or similar) is a very easy way to present them with a logical next click.

3. The alternate products are presented as ‘similar products’

4. While I like affilistore, I think you have to spell out to visitors what’s going on with each page. On the product page. Heading a product page up with “We’ve found 8 products that match ‘Magicbox Dab Kitchen Radio’ – check out our recommendations below” helps them understand what’s going on.

PATIENCE

Finally, I think perhaps the biggest problem with the site was patience. It looks like you gave up on the site a little early. There are 5 or 6 news items & then it’s been abandoned. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as perhaps you found something more successful & put your efforts into that – but I’d have given it a bit more time & think you could still make it work pretty easily.

I hope that helps – good luck!