AWS and redirect link

[pierrebenoit]

Hi all,

When you build an AWS site, there are two steps so that the users can go to Amazon (As I saw to many websites):

1- A page with products: picture, price, "you save...", a link that point to the detail page

2- detail page for each product and link that go to Amazon.

*Do you think, it is important to keep the step 2 in your server?

** I was thinking that if the step1 directs users directly to amazon, CTR will increase. Do you try this??

Thanks

[MarkB]

On my site with a direct link (ie, no details page), my conversion rate is higher than the sites with detail pages. I'll be stripping those detail pages off soon and just using direct links :)

[r2d2]

Hmm, interesting will have to give that method a try - it would mean lots less pages in Google though.... My cooking site now has ~18,000 :) And most of my traffic goes from links from Google to product detail pages.

[pickled]

I HIGHLY recommend looking at your entry points before you bother with the switch...they should mostly be your detail pages. What I would expect is that removing the pages would increase your CR, but your traffic and sales will drop significantly.

CR is very important, but it is not everything.

[James]

but your traffic and sales will drop significantly.
"my conversion rate is higher than the sites with detail pages. I'll be stripping those detail pages off soon and just using direct links"

[chrispian]

On my AWS sites it is the details pages that get indexed by google most, not the cateogry pages. Also, they are the ones that get hit when someone searches for keyword. It would be a disaster for me to switch.

[MarkB]

Some stats from my quarter so far:

Single AWS site with direct links (no product pages) - 34 products sold

4 other AWS sites, with products pages, combined - 34 products sold

Now, sure, the single AWS site has products people usually order multiple items from. But these are still about 15 seperate orders.

My thinking is, who can sell a product better - me or Amazon?

[pickled]

tntcheats -- not sure why you posted that. I considered that information before I posted, and what I posted is still correct.

MarkB -- You can't really compare sites like that, you need a lot more numbers and controls set to do an accurate comparision of which is best. I would not make decisions based on that info.

To simplify my original point -- I can almost guarantee that 90% (or more) of the traffic to your AWS sites comes from the product detail pages. If you remove those your traffic will die and your conversion rate won't matter since you won't have enough traffic to generate the # of sales you'd want.

[MarkB]

I *can* compare sites like that, and I *will*. Infact, I have already :p

And I should, perhaps, add that my 'combined' sites get twice as much traffic as the single (first) example.

[r2d2]

But I also sell more cooking items than plasma screens.

Also I agree with pickled, I would rather have 1k clicks and a 1% CR, than 100 clicks and 5% CR. Like he says, CR isnt everything.

[moonshield]

fascinating, does this seem to be true for the more expensive items or the less expensive ones?

[MarkB]

R2 - if you have a site where 100 clicks is a CTR of 5%, then building the traffic to 1000 clicks at 5% would be less work than building traffic to 1000 clicks with 1% CTR, no?

[r2d2]

Hold on, are we talking about 'Click Through Rate' or 'Conversion Ratio'?

Since its the details pages that gets the traffic, I would think building any traffic would be difficult without indexed details pages.

Maybe the market of the site would make a difference, I guess it could work for some products?

[MarkB]

Sorry, I thought you were talking about click-thru. But the same thing applies. I'd rather a site with a CR of 5% than one with 1%, as I can always build traffic (or try to :P).

[r2d2]

(or try to :P).

Yep, I guess thats the clincher. If its 10 times harder to get traffic to product list pages, then the 1% CR will still be better. But if its only twice as hard, then direct links would be better....

[pickled]

as I can always build traffic

right, and the least expensive, least time consuming way to do that with an AWS site is.....?

[MarkB]

The advertising co-op of course.

[pickled]

perhaps this will persuade you:

Q3 2004 (I had to go back to Q3 to get some relatively stable stats)
---------
clicks: 7912
total orders:731
conversion rate:9.24%
commish: $2800+

That was generated by 2 main AWS sites and one brand new one that wasn't doing much yet. All that was done to promote these was a little link building, and smart SEO work on the product pages.

[MarkB]

And that is meant to persuade me how? I've had AWS sites with product pages since I started making them (about 8 months ago) - the one without product pages, which I launched in January, is already outperforming them. Go figure!:)

[pickled]

> persuade me how?

I figured my conversion rate, and number of sales would beat yours and you would envy me :)

Seriously, take my order number, your conversion rate, and figure out the level of traffic you'd need for your site without the product pages. If you can get that to work out at a less cost than I did (I think I spent about $220 total in promotion), I'll envy you and change my sites asap.

> the one without product pages, which I launched in January
> is already outperforming them

Ahhh...weird stuff like that happens to me all the time in the aff biz. My AWS sites continue to kick the butt of every other site I have (20 or so total), all of which are more original, one of which is 100% original, and one is running itself into the ground on some crappy PHP script some guy in a forums sold me one time ;)

[MarkB]

Horses for courses, I suppose :)

[pierrebenoit]

Please,

what do you mean by "The advertising co-op of course"

Thanks

[MarkB]

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

[chromate]

Perhaps an interesting thing to do would be to compromise between the two models...

Keep the product detail pages - but only in a very sparse form, with just enough detail to rank well. ie, no reviews etc just a title, description and pic, with a button / link saying "more details" (NOT a buy button) that goes straight to amazon's product detail page.

That way, Amazon will take care of the conversions and you'll still get traffic from search engines via the datail pages.

I'm not directing this post at anyone in particular, just throwing open an idea :) I pretty much gave up with AWS ages ago. Though, it does still make me a reasonable amount of money.