How Blocked Traffic Impacts Affiliate ROI
Affiliate marketers invest countless hours in improving their SEO rankings, producing content, and increasing the number of visitors to their websites. Whether from organic or paid traffic sources, each click is an investment.
Unfortunately, not all of these visitors will enjoy the opportunity to convert and license their data to the online operators. Many will be blocked before they even reach the licensed operator. While this can be frustrating and often impacts the conversion rate, the biggest impact of blocked traffic is on the affiliate ROI.
Every blocked visitor impacts the affiliate’s ROI. Understanding how blocked traffic impacts affiliate ROI will allow affiliate marketers to generate more profit from their current programs.
What Is Affiliate ROI?
The return on investment (ROI) for affiliate marketers will indicate how much revenue they generate compared to how costly it was to generate that traffic. For affiliate marketers, several factors will impact the affiliate ROI:
Traffic costs
Conversion rates
Commissions
Quality of the players offering the traffic
Value of the customer
Blocked traffic will impact every one of these metrics.
Every Visitor Has a Cost
The traffic that affiliates generate is not free. Even with organic traffic, affiliate marketers must invest in improving their website and content. The traffic costs include:
Improving SEO
Creating and improving the content on the website
Maintaining the website
Building links
Improving the website’s technical elements
If the visitors are blocked, the affiliate has to invest in acquiring these visitors but obtains few profits from them.
Lost Conversions Reduce Campaign Efficiency
The more visitors that are blocked, the less the affiliate will convert from these visitors. Many visitors will leave the website and visit another that can convert them. The loss of these conversions means the affiliate will make less revenue from their campaigns.
Higher Acquisition Costs
As the number of blocked visitors increases, the affiliate must acquire more visitors to make up the difference in conversions. This will require an investment in acquiring these visitors by increasing spending on advertisements, producing more content, and investing in SEO.
Geographic Mismatches
One of the most common reasons for blocked traffic is geographic incompatibility between the visitor and the online operator. For example, a visitor from Canada might get redirected to an online operator licensed in Europe. Similarly, an online operator in Germany might receive offers for games that are unavailable in their country. A visitor from the United States may click on a website offer a casino that is illegal in their state.
Reduced Earnings Per Click
With blocked traffic, the affiliate’s earnings per click will decline. The number of website clicks will remain the same, but the decrease in the number of visitors that get licensed will reduce the affiliate’s revenue per click.
Lost Data Creates Poor Decisions
If an affiliate marketer does not track blocked traffic, they may make poor decisions about their marketing campaigns. They may conclude that a particular landing page is not performing well or that the online operators are not converting the visitors well. This data will be skewed because of blocked traffic.
Damage to User Experience
The user experience should always be the primary concern for any website. If visitors to the affiliate marketer’s website are encountering blocked traffic they will have a poor experience on the website. They may see error messages or find that the redirected website does not offer the games they wanted. This will impact their opinion of the affiliate marketer’s website.
Better user experiences will result in better affiliate monetization and user trust.
Recover Revenue With Smart Routing
By implementing a traffic routing system, affiliate marketers can recover some of the revenue lost from blocked visitors. These systems will evaluate several factors about the visitor before allowing them to continue to the online operator. These factors will include the location of the visitor, the type of device they are using, the language of their browser, the availability of online operators, and the rules of the affiliate marketer’s campaigns. If the visitor is blocked from the targeted operator, they will be automatically redirected to an alternative operator.
Diversify Operator Partnerships
Instead of working with a small number of online operators, affiliate marketers can diversify their operator partnerships to improve the success of their campaigns. Working with a variety of operators ensures that there is a better chance that a blocked visitor will be redirected to an operator that matches their geographical area of interest. The benefits of this practice include:
Exposure to a larger market
More opportunities to convert visitors
Less reliance on a single online operator
Better targeting of specific geographical regions
Build Localized Experiences
Affiliate marketers can create localized experiences for their visitors. For example, they can create separate websites and content for specific countries. Some of the content that can be localized includes:
Casino rankings for specific countries
Bonus websites and content for specific geographical regions
Payment guides for specific countries
Specific landing pages for specific markets
Each of these elements will improve the visitor experience and allow more visitors to convert.
Monitor the Right KPIs
The blocked visitor rate should become a metric that is tracked on every affiliate marketer’s dashboard. The affiliate marketer should monitor the number of blocked visitors, the revenue that has been recovered by the implementation of routing software, the geographic conversion rates, the number of successful redirects, and the EPC for each country of origin for their website visitors.
AI Is Improving ROI Optimization
Artificial intelligence tools that track and route website traffic are improving the ability of affiliate marketers to optimize their ROI. AI tools will evaluate the same factors as traffic routing software but will automate the process of finding an alternative online operator for a visitor that is blocked from the targeted operator. AI software can also monitor these several metrics to report to the affiliate marketer.
The benefits of implementing artificial intelligence in affiliate management include:
Automated detection of the best online operator for each visitor
Automated detection of issues in the traffic routing process
Automated identification of underperforming geographical markets
Automated recommendations for changes to advertising campaigns
Automated forecasts of potential revenue from the affiliate program
Common ROI Mistakes
There are a few mistakes that affiliate marketers make that continue to reduce their profitability from affiliate programs. These mistakes include:
Measuring clicks but not conversions
Ignoring blocked visitor data
Promoting online operators to users from all geographical areas
Using outdated affiliate links
Ignoring the performance of traffic routing software
Correcting these issues will result in an immediate improvement in the affiliate marketer’s revenue.
Best Practices
To protect the ROI of their affiliate programs, affiliate marketers should:
Monitor the number of blocked visitors daily
Build relationships with a variety of online operators
Optimize the traffic routing software
Build localized content and websites for specific countries
Review the affiliate links regularly
Track the number of conversions by region
Test the user journey on the website
Analyze the opportunities for improving the website’s recovery of visitors who are blocked from the target online operators
Following these best practices will maximize the affiliate’s potential revenue from the website visitors.
Final Thoughts
Every visitor that is blocked from the licensed online operator reduces the affiliate’s ROI. This is because the affiliate invested in acquiring the visitors and generating the traffic.
By monitoring blocked traffic and improving geographical targeting of the affiliate marketer’s websites and by implementing routing software and optimizing their operator partnerships and websites’ content, they can significantly improve their ROI from their affiliate programs. In an increasingly competitive and saturated industry, maximizing the value of the traffic that is already generated is one of the smartest strategies for the affiliate marketers to increase their revenue.