Back Offers: The Unsung Heroes of Affiliate Marketing

Back Offers: The Unsung Heroes of Affiliate Marketing
Crakrevenue- back-offers

Affiliate Marketing

Written by

Mike

PUBLISHED ON

November 14, 2018

Category

Affiliate Marketing

Web marketing is hard.

Out of all the clicks you can generate through your content and advertising spots, only a select few will actually turn into the much sought-after conversions you live for.

This can result in a great deal of anxiety for affiliates.

It’s already a challenge to bring traffic to my website—and now you’re telling me I need tons of clicks before making any money?!

Yeah.

You’re in for a rude awakening, but that’s the way it goes. Especially in adult, you often need tens of thousands of hits before striking a sale. Seems discouraging? In fact, it’s totally normal.

Conversion rates swing wildly depending on industry, niche, product, audience, chosen spot, brand power, trust level, and so on. It’s not as simple as saying you’ll make one sale for every 1000 clicks.

As a general rule of thumb, we consider a 3% conversion rate to be good. With enough volume this is a pretty big deal, we really have something worthy of optimizing. On average though, conversion rates tend to hover around 1-2%.

When a user clicks on your ads, he or she is sent (in most cases) to a dedicated landing page.

That’s where a product or service is sold to them so you can get a commission.

Now then, what if the end user is not from a country or using a device covered by the offer? He or she would automatically trigger the fallback offer — a redirect to ensure you nor your traffic never leaves empty-handed.

Ok, ok, but what if it’s not something they care about and they quickly hit the back button on their browser? Does that mean you already lost a sale before even trying? Of course not!

There are multiple ways we as a CPA network mitigate losses, one of them being our Smartlinks, which are comprised of our top performing offers and always congruent with your traffic’s interests.

Another way we help you make more revenue online is by featuring optimized back offers. So, when your traffic hits the dreaded back button, they’re faced with something akin to “But wait, there’s more!” from infomercials (i.e., new offers to tempt them.)

Why are back offers useful for affiliates?

First and foremost, back offers can be best described as powerful retention tools.

You must understand they’re a last-ditch effort to try and turn lost customers (yes, lost) into conversions.  

Think of it like this: a direct offer (the main one) is at the very heart of your affiliate marketing efforts: it’s your champion. On the other hand, back offers provide much needed support. It’s like having multiple wrestlers at your disposal to put a show on the ring — a real tag team!

It’s all upside too: you can only expect more revenue from using our back offers.

While they’re a special add-on attached to all our offers, they have absolutely no negative impact on performance because they’re treated separately. Here’s an example to better illustrate what we mean by that:

  • Without a back offer: 1 user -> 1 click -> 0 conversion
  • With a back offer: 1 user -> up to 6 clicks (direct offer + back offers) -> 1 conversion on the 5th layer

In the previous example, back offers indeed had a role to play with your stats like earnings per click (EPC). Our back offers channels usually have 5 layers, so in this case it would have taken that many extra offers to finally convert the user – but we did! Remember, this was a lost sale to begin with, so that’s pretty encouraging.

However, it’s important to differentiate clicks from users. Back offers don’t boost the latter, so we indeed do more with less.

With the same traffic, we will be 6 times more likely to convert each user instead of just one (without a back offer). Consolidated EPC might take a hit, but that’s not what you should be caring about in the first place.

Let’s face it, back offers will put more money in your pocket – “sexy” stats be damned!

We understand you might still want to have cleaner stats so that’s why we added the possibility of removing factored-in "back offer" information from your EPC stats, therefore getting the “pure” version.

To get the detailed breakdown, log in to your affiliate dashboard, select Statistics then More data options. You will be presented with this screen:

back offers stats affiliate dashboard

Under Dimensions, check the Campaign Name box and click Apply.

This way you’ll be able to see traffic that reached back offers, isolate it and understand how much revenue it brought in—which can be very enlightening to one’s overall marketing strategy.

How so, you ask?

Well, if a huge part of your income was from a specific back offer, you could always then tweak your campaign and turn that once back offer into a more prominent & direct offer better suited for future campaigns (to make you more money, duh!).

It’s all about understanding your audience and leading them to content they’ll love to spend their money on.

What if I don’t want back offers?

Our affiliate platform allows you to easily decide whether or not you want to include back offers.

While activated by default, you can toggle them off under Extra Earnings from your unique tracking link:

back offers affiliate tracking

Of course this would be like leaving money on the table, but we understand there are some corner cases where you might want to go without them. You can update your affiliate links any time further down the road.

Wrapping Things Up

To put it simply, back offers are there to increase your earnings—by 25% on average without additional effort.

Since we've enabled them back in 2014 (time flies!), affiliates have been able to display complementary offers to their users who hit the back button on their favorite browsers, effectively turning lost sales into conversions. It's a last ditch effort to seduce your traffic with additional, highly optimized offers.

At CrakRevenue, back offers are part of what we dubbed our Triple E method or Extra Earnings Enabled. It's comprised of pop-unders and you guessed it back offers. Together they form an ultimate alliance to maximize your profits with the help of incredible sales funnels.

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