Inspired by a post made by Paul earlier today, his post seems to take a more retail angle on it with shopping carts and pre fillings them. The general gist of the post is that once you pre sell a product on your site or in your PPC ad copy in an ideal world the user would then land on the merchants checkout page rather than a product page where they then have to be sold the product again.
Lets face it if you’ve sold the product well enough by the time the user clicks your link they just want to pay, not go through some tedious registration process or start building their shopping cart up. So… what levels of deeplinking are available and just how do they affect conversion?
Homepage – generally the lowest conversion of all unless you have a lot of generic traffic or are promoting a large brand. No deeplinking at all and you really are leaving it down to the merchants site to pull its weight.
Category deeplinking – A step better and a lot more targeted. Should see increased conversion, still a bit generic but gives the user the chance to browse around the products offered by a merchant and if it’s a good merchant site it will be easy to browse that category and the products in it.
Product deeplinking – Highly targeted, the user has been pre sold or searched for a particular product and the affiliate has given it to them.
For retail that’s about it, its hard to get the user any closer to buying than a product page, for travel there are a few other options available.
Availability searches – a deeplink that searches for availability on a given hotel, apartment or destination. This will land a user on a page that shows hotels that are actually available, category (country, destination or resort) links could land a user on a page with 20 hotels but only 5 may be available for the dates the person wants to travel. An availability link will only show what’s actually available and ready to book.
XML availability links – as close as you can get to payment. The affiliate performs the availability search via an XML API and knows whats available, they then give links back to their user for each establishment that land a user on the page where they select which room they want.
That’s about as far as you can go with deeplinking without handling secure data. For example if you look at some travel agent websites they look as if they are handing the booking themselves, they take all the personal details and the payment details, however they are actually just making bookings with other companies via XML over a secure connection. So you book via XYZ travel, pay £500 they pay whoever they have made the booking with the rate they get and keep the rest as their commission.
Id like to say this is the future of affiliate marketing for larger affiliate sites, being able to handle all the data themselves but with how slow the industry progresses I cant see it happening within the next 5 years.
