Part of the answer is to check in with your affiliate (or their provider) and look at your impressions, clicks and sales. But this is only part of the answer.

To get the complete picture you need to use your web analytics tool to track some key things on your site:

1. Page views on the pages with the affiliate links
2. How visitors navigated to these pages
3. Clicks on the links through to the affiliate sites

Why do you need to check these too? I knew you’d ask.

Page views should be approximately the same as the impressions reported by your affiliate. Hopefully your affiliate will report a higher number of impressions as visitors return to their site with the same cookie set. It certainly should not be less – this could be a sign that your tracking code is wrong

Navigation to these pages is useful to know because you want to know where visitors come from and which referrers are working for you. Your web analytics tool should be able to show which is the most successful, whether it’s organic search (Google etc) or direct referrers.

It’s good to start tracking the clicks out of your site. If you don’t track them they will just be reported as exits by your web analytics system. This will give you a terrible click through rate and make your efforts seem worthless! You can add tracking to your outbound links using Javascript onclick functions, or you can insert your own gateway pages that have their own tracking code.

If you can get started with these metrics then you can start to really understand your traffic and what it is doing for you.

Otherwise you’re just working in the dark…

Whether it’s Florida, Italy, Las Vegas or Kauai, one way to think about this is to imagine what you would want from a site if you were searching for somewhere to stay. I would look for:

• Great pictures
• Guest testimonials
• Availability information
• Information about the location
• An easy way to contact the owner

…and finally…

• Something unique that makes it stand out above the other dozen sites that I’ve already looked at.

Of course you need all the usual boring stuff like info on the rooms, price, location, etc, etc. You’d also want it to look professional but friendly. But these things don’t get you noticed and probably won’t convince your visitors to click the ‘contact me’ button.

How does your vacation rental website look?

One group sent me towards the plane which I’d already missed (don’t get me started on why I had missed it).

I gave my ticket to a guy at the counter and he asked me who I was and which flight I was on. Wasn’t that information on the ticket?

In return for my delay I got a 10 pound voucher which I could use for a “cup of tea”. I asked the guy where I could get a decent one but he didn’t have any idea.

So I headed to Gordon Ramsay’s new T5 restaurant called Plane Food. I could be certain of spending at least 10 pounds there.

I was greeted with a welcome smile and a “hello, how has your day been”.

The staff served me a wonderful meal of pan fried sea bream. They came back and checked on me occasionally, just to make sure I was OK and enjoying the food.

Other staff were moving quickly and efficiently around the restaurant, checking on tables, making sure wine glasses were spotlessly clean.

So which customer service experience left me with the best impression?

Which one matches the customer service that you provide through your online business? Do you show that you care about your customers? Is your contact information easy to find and do you take these enquiries seriously? Do you listen to your customer’s issues and deal with them? Are your staff trained to understand your products and services so that they can help?

If the answer to these is no then you might be leaving a bad taste in your customer’s mouth…

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]]> http://www.infinite42.com/blog/heathrow-terminal-5-may-i-help-you/feed 0 http://www.infinite42.com/blog/announcing-the-end-of-this-blog http://www.infinite42.com/blog/announcing-the-end-of-this-blog#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 20:17:09 +0000 dr.richard http://www.infinite42.com/?p=26 The End. Fin.

This is my final post. After today there will be no more updates to this blog.

How does this make you feel? A little bit sad, maybe? It probably makes you feel like checking some of my previous posts. You’d better take a look before it stops and you lose the chance to benefit from all the great wisdom…

The truth is this isn’t my last post, but this demonstrates a technique that is often used to raise interest in a product, or a website.

“Available for one week only”

“$10 now but the price will be $30 after 15th May”

…and so on. I’m sure you are familiar. If you use this technique on your website then remember that you need to be authentic. If you’re pulling the product then don’t put it back 2 weeks later. If you do your customers may get angry and they may tell other potential customers that you are a fake.

Also don’t forget that this works for the short term only. “Available for one more year” doesn’t really have the same pull, does it?

On the way to the mall to look at an iPod Touch the other night Chris Daughtry’s Over You was playing on STAR 101.3. I like the song and it was good to listen to on a sunny spring evening.

Playing with the iPod in the Apple Store I popped up iTunes and there was the track again. Of course I listened to it and it sounded great.

Driving to the airport today while thinking about this post I noticed a billboard by the freeway with Daughtry’s face on it and STAR 101.3. Then I saw an ad for the iPod.

Can you achieve this amount of consistency in your website and online presence? Before you stop me and say “wait just a second, you’re asking us to control the airwaves now?” – let me explain. You have many different places and channels where your online business gets seen. Are you doing your best to make sure that your message looks the same across all these?

1. Is your blog integrated into your site or bolted on with a completely different look and navigation?
2. Do all your pages have a similar look and feel and consistent navigation?
3. Do your autoresponder emails use the same style as the website?
4. Do they come from the same domain as the website or from a provider with a different address?
5. Do the emails work with the message of your website?
6. Do you provide support and is this as friendly and helpful as the website?
7. If you talk to customers on the phone are you as helpful as your website says you are?
8. Do your online adverts share a consistent message or do they just grab visitors (and disappoint them when they reach your web pages)?

You may not have the marketing reach of iTunes and the airwaves but you have a number of channels that you can control. If you can make your messages consistent then they build on each other and reinforce each other and provide a better overall experience for the customer.

My experience with the iPod was enhanced by seeing and hearing consistent, familiar messages in places that I wasn’t expecting. Because it made the experience better it made it more likely that I would buy the iPod (I did).

The only thing I haven’t done yet is download the song from iTunes