Been discussed a number of times before and I even had a quick post about them last January here but at a time of year where everyone’s getting a lot of shopping done online and everyone wants to save money they seem to be getting a lot of attention again – and my opinions changed!
Im not arrogant, think I know loads or stubborn. Given some evidence or a way of testing something ill gladly change my opinion towards pretty much anything. A few weeks ago alpha introduced a voucher system into the checkout process. Now we were already listed on a number of voucher sites anyway with “no codes available” next to the listings and we got a small trickle of traffic and a couple of sales.
Now we’ve got vouchers it gives us a little bit of something extra to test – do they work, do they drive incremental sales, and more importantly do they steal sales from other affiliates.
We’ve not had them live long and the only use ive made so far is 2 codes giving fairly generic discounts, one that gave a fixed £10 off all hotel bookings and another that gave a fixed £15 off Sol Melia hotels just to see if we could drive a bit of targeted traffic. Now we’re big on stats at alpha (I often worry when I see some merchant posts on the A4U forum about where traffic comes from, de-duping sales etc) so we know where people come into the site and how they navigate around but more importantly we know if they get to the payment page, start a new session (ie. a new window/tab) and then use a voucher in their original session.
Witchcraft? Not quite, jut good analytics. Its early day and the data not 100% conclusive but things actually look good in favour of voucher sites. Sales coming in, using the vouchers are mostly new customers and not coming in via the method explained above.
Also turns out the IAB have come up with some voucher rules kicking in next year which is great – will networks act on them? Who knows.
Dan, watching hollyoaks
