A geo-targeting service has been launched that is designed to increase sales made by Amazon affiliates, or “associates”, as Amazon calls them.
Affiliates of iTunes and eBay should also find this service useful, as will affiliates of any affiliate merchant which has separate retail stores in various countries.
For example, Amazon runs separate retail websites for the United States, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and China.
Here’s the problem that Amazon associates face:
Picture this… a visitor lands on your blog and likes the sound of a book you’re enthusiastically recommending. She clicks on your affiliate link… and arrives at Amazon.com.
The trouble is, she lives in the UK and doesn’t want to pay the extra shipping involved with shopping at the US store. She doesn’t want to pay in dollars instead of pounds sterling and doesn’t want to wait for extra shipping time for the product to arrive. So instead of buying immediately, she goes to the UK store – Amazon.co.uk – and buys the book there.
The same sort of thing will happen with a visitor who lives in Canada. He wants to shop at Amazon.ca, not Amazon.com.
Result: You’ve put in the time, money and effort, but you miss out on a sale and commission. Hardly seems fair, does it?
How many times are bloggers and website owners sending visitors to the wrong store, and missing out on a sale because of it? It must happen an awful lot.
Mat Richardson of the UK has figured out how to solve this problem for small and medium sized affiliates. (Large affiliates can do their own special programming.)
He has launched Go2Geo, a simple to use geo-targeting URL shortening service.
Here’s how it works…
You don’t have to install any software.
You sign up with Go 2 Geo, enter the necessary details, and are given a shortened link to use to promote the book, or whatever product you’re promoting.
Now when your visitor clicks on one of these links, she’s directed to the appropriate store, depending on her location. For each product, there’s just one link, but multiple possible geographic destinations.
Mat, who is founder and CEO of Go2Geo, says: “The idea was to create a cheap and easy to use product which would allow the user to mop up all of their lost revenue. A product which is ready to go right out of the box, aimed at the small to medium player who would be able to smartly target their traffic and redirect them based on their geographic location, all from a single link. The kind of people who previously, to achieve the same result, would have had to set up their own costly system, give a company a share of their profits and limit provider choice or miss out on non-local revenues all together.”
You can start with a basic subscription and scale up as your business grows.
You also get realtime analytics to determine where your traffic is coming from and whether all of those customers are being serviced by your default link location. Then you can take action using Go2Geo to redirect those potential customers to the best geographical location.
As well as Amazon associates, this geo-targeting service should have huge appeal for iTunes affiliates.
Mat says iTunes and the App Store have 155 distinct regional storefronts with 45 country specific affiliate programs serving them. Ebay which has 5 storefronts.
If you’re an affiliate of Amazon, iTunes or eBay and you receive international traffic, you’ve got to be wondering: “How many visitors am I sending to the wrong store?”
Try Go2Geo now and send your visitors to the RIGHT store.
