While WBUR Guides did not turn a profit, the process of building the site and testing promotion methods revealed critical insights into the prospects for affiliate marketing within Public Media web properties. 

WBUR’s Future with Affiliate Marketing

Should we make a similar effort again, we’d use Facebook ads only for testing content and for email acquisition. Also, we now know not to embark on such an effort without securing a commitment to promote the content extensively where our regular readers and listeners are most engaged, which is on-air and on www.wbur.org.

At WBUR, we’ve seen steady year-over-year revenue growth from Amazon ever since we began inserting their affiliate links into our book articles in August of 2017:

Amazon retail eCommerce sales in the US have shown consistent growth, and eMarketer projects further growth in the future for Amazon and US eCommerce sales in general. Barring unpredictable macro-trends in the economy, we expect that consistently applied affiliate links on existing content will expand revenue each year for the near-future.

The clean and transparent design of the guides site attracted praise from our underwriting department, so we may work with them to repurpose the design of WBUR Guides for sponsored content. Additionally, the data yielded from our more than 120 ad tests will be helpful in focusing how we pitch sponsored content to potential underwriters. Thanks to those tests, we know that our audience is interested in women’s shoes and sustainable home goods, and we know that the audience coming from www.wbur.org is more receptive to content that is closer to journalism in its style.

Our Advice to Public Media Organizations

Following these tenets should help you prepare to engage in affiliate marketing at your organization and accurately measure  your audience’s reaction once you’re ready to promote it.

• Begin by promoting Amazon affiliate links. The variety of products from their site means you can promote almost anything, and see what has traction. When you’ve identified your niche, find a vendor in CJ which caters to that category and take advantage of CJ’s higher commission.
• Publish and test a variety of content, including different writing styles. The results may surprise you. Until we ran tests which proved otherwise, we’d expected vegetable delivery to outperform women’s shoes.
• Track everything. Track each step that your audience takes so you can understand where they’re hitting snags, and determine which audience is most likely to yield product-clicks.
• Organic Traffic is your most valuable asset. Work with your editorial team to integrate affiliate marketing content and promote affiliate content within your news site as much as is possible. The closer the affiliate content is to your core content the more your audience will embrace it.
• Facebook is great for testing, but using it simply to advertise your content is unlikely to produce a profit. You’ll always pay more for your audience than they yield in referral fees.

If you haven’t already, check out our previous posts in this series on affiliate marketing: The Challenge, The Strategy, and The Numbers & The Lessons.

If you have any questions about this experiment, or if you’re planning affiliate marketing content, please feel free to contact me at tbfuller@bu.edu or on Twitter at @ted_fuller

As we approached the Affiliate Marketing project, we established key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure while testing, and to guide the refinement of our strategy. Both of our KPIs are based on product clicks from our product guides on WBUR Guides to retailer websites. Once users leave our site we can’t track which of them convert to purchase, so product clicks are the limit of our ability to track users from acquisition through to conversion.

Our most important KPI for evaluating each promotional campaign is Product Click Rate. This allows us to judge varying audiences by indicating their relative likelihood to click one of our products.

Product Click Rate = Quantity of Product Clicks / Quantity of Users

When comparing paid campaigns, the most important KPI is Cost-per-Product-Click. This makes it easy to understand which of your paid campaigns is arriving at your desired end-result most cost-effectively.

Cost Per Product Click = $ Cost of Campaign / Quantity of Product Clicks

Traffic to Guides and Earnings from Amazon and CJ Affiliates

Between site launch on May 23, 2019 and the close of the project July 31, 2019, more than 39,000 users visited our site in over 42,000 sessions.

• That activity yielded $203.01 in referral earnings from 111 purchases. (I’ll spare you the grisly details, but $203 is far less than we invested in Facebook ads.)
• 77% of user purchases came from Amazon, and the rest from individual retailers registered with CJ Affiliates.
• Overall, we received a 7.01% commission from our referred Amazon sales, and a 12.76% commission from CJ Affiliates.
• 72% of our Amazon sales were for indirect purchases – i.e. users clicked one of our links, then bought something else entirely.

Lesson: Begin with Amazon, then use CJ Affiliates

Our advice is to start out with Amazon and test a variety of product reviews your audience may appreciate. Measure their ROI with analytics, and monitor the products for which you’ve earned referral revenue. When you’ve found a niche, use CJ Affiliates to connect with advertisers who may be paying higher commissions than Amazon. Our reasoning is:

• Amazon offers a greater variety of products which you can advertise, and you’ll earn revenue for any Amazon purchase made by your referred audience in the 24 hours after they clicked your referral link. That’s powerful when you consider that Amazon was responsible for 33.7% of the eCommerce market in 2018.
• CJ Affiliates pays a higher commission but does not offer the above described advantage of cross-purchases. Choosing the right niche will result in higher earnings from CJ, but reviewing unpopular niche products could lead to no revenue at all.

Most Successful Guide & Product

We published a total of 11 guides, covering 10 categories including sustainable home goods, women’s shoes, travel goods, fresh vegetable delivery, and reusable straws.

Our audience was receptive – of the 120 users who answered our embedded survey, 87% said WBUR Guides are “useful,” and 82% want to see more Guides.

Our guide to women’s shoes, The Six Most Comfortable Shoes for Every Type of Traveler, proved to be the most popular:

• We ran a Facebook ad sending users to our homepage where we list all our published articles and 71% of those who clicked on an article chose to visit the guide to women’s shoes, despite its position as ten out of eleven in the list.
• Our first run of Facebook ads tested fresh vegetable delivery, eyeglasses, women’s shoes, and children’s toys against each other, to determine which of our ads had the greatest appeal. Users who saw the ad for Women’s Shoes clicked through at a 2.04% rate, more than twice the click-through-rate of any other ad in the test.

The above described ad series yielded three shoe purchases; no other guide produced such immediate and consistent results. In particular, one shoe, the Born Lemhi, produced more click-throughs and revenue than any other single product we advertised. Testing the image of that pair against our other featured women’s shoes in a series of Facebook ads, it yielded an ad click-through-rate four times greater than the other shoe options.

Lesson: Publish and Test a Variety of Content

Publish a variety of content and test it head-to-head using A/B testing. Find your niche by understanding which products attract an audience and then generate click-throughs and purchases. Before testing, we thought fresh vegetables and toys would perform better than women’s shoes!

Lesson: Track Everything

Before you begin to promote your content, be sure that you are prepared to track your audience’s response. You’ll need:

• Google Analytics: Install this on your site to track your site’s overall usage and analyze your audience.
• Google Tag Manager: Connect GTM to Google Analytics to track important actions such as product clicks as goals in Google Analytics. 
• Google URL Builder: Every time you distribute a link to your content as part of a campaign, use this tool to set up UTM parameters, including a unique campaign name for each link. When users click those links and arrive at your site, the parameters you added allow Google Analytics to attribute that traffic to your specified campaign.

When these tools are used together, you’ll be able to attribute each user and each product click to a campaign. That way, when you strike gold and a torrent of product clicks register, you’ll be able to understand which campaign sent those users and either repeat or refine your technique.

Advertising platforms like Facebook can tell you what it cost to acquire the users, but not whether those users converted to product clicks. When using these analytics tools to connect the cost of the campaign to the end result of product-clicks, you’ll get a clearer sense of ROI.

Finally, survey your affiliate marketing audience either through a marketing email or by embedding a survey on your site. Our survey collected ideas for further guides, and the overwhelmingly positive responses justified our effort to promote them on WBUR.org.

Sources of Traffic

Over the course of the experiment, we promoted the site with 104 Facebook ads, 16 banner variations on www.wbur.org, 2 mentions within articles on www.wbur.org, 6 tweets, and 1 marketing email.

We saw the best product click-through-rates for audiences originating from www.wbur.org and from our email list. Paid traffic originating from Facebook was far less likely to click on one of our suggested products – even our most successful Facebook ad could not compete with the results from organic traffic.

*This marketing email was a low-volume test with only 14 email addresses, but it showed encouraging results.

Successful WBUR.org Affiliate Articles

It has long been WBUR’s practice to use Amazon affiliate links when an editorial article makes reference to a book. These links appear in articles sharing lists of books, i.e. holiday gift guide or summer reading lists, as well as author interviews. This is an exception to the station’s overall guideline against posting affiliate marketing content on WBUR.org.

The above chart follows the large number of orders (blue bars) as well as the page traffic for the summer reading list article (red line). The yellow line indicates the portion of that traffic sent from our paid Facebook ads. Our campaign successfully sent users to the article, but the visible gap in the chart between traffic and purchases indicates that users sent by Facebook ads were not as primed to make a purchase.  Before our campaign ran, over 5% of the page’s audience made an order, earning $.08 cents per user. During the period of our campaign, that dropped to 1.5% or only $0.02 cents per user.

This chart follows the earnings generated by the article each day (green bars) as well as the amount we invested in Facebook ads each day of our three-day campaign (red bars). Our campaign resulted in a somewhat anemic boost to earnings, and did not recoup the $600 spent on promotion.

Lesson: Organic Traffic is Necessary to Produce a Profit

Your station’s organic web traffic is your most precious resource in Affiliate Marketing; this audience is already engaged with your content, and you’re more likely to hold their interest through to a product click. Work with your editorial team to expose your content to the readers of your news site as much as is possible.

In our case, we couldn’t treat our guides as if they were regular news articles on WBUR.org, but we managed to extract concessions like inserting links to guides into relevant articles as well as promoting the content with banners on WBUR.org.

You should expect push-back from your editorial team. Journalists may have an antipathy towards Affiliate Marketing in principle, as it departs from orthodox journalism standards. Get your foot in the door where you’re allowed and track your results, surveying your audience if possible. If you can demonstrate that your content added value for the reader while earning income, you may have an easier time making your case for further affiliate marketing efforts.

Lesson: Facebook ads will not turn a profit for affiliate marketing

You’ll always pay more for your audience than can wring out of them in referral fees. Consider using it instead as a tool for testing content or to acquire email addresses. Our Facebook ads only worked during the period when they ran. If instead you can get the user’s email address, you may continue to market your affiliate content to them at no cost using an email newsletter.

Writing Style

Over the course of the project, we hired two contributors with distinct voices. We asked our first author, Rebecca Palermo to write product reviews from a personal perspective, while we asked our second author, Rachel Brandt to used a more explanatory style which more closely resembled journalism. We asked them to each write an article about sustainable home goods, then measured our audience’s reaction to each style.

Our results indicated that users coming from Facebook ads were more engaged with the product review writing-style. Meanwhile, those coming from WBUR.org banner ads appeared to find the explanatory journalism-style content more engaging.

Lesson: Test Different Writing Styles

Try different writing styles to see what is most effective at connecting with your users. Keep in mind that different acquisition methods may affect which content is most-appreciated by your users.

In our case, our realization of the value of WBUR’s organic audience means that we’d stick with a writing style that looks and feels more like journalism, as it appears to capture the attention of that audience more effectively.

Our next blog post in this series on affiliate marketing will cover future prospects for affiliate marketing within media organizations.

If you haven’t already, check out our previous posts in this series on The Challenge and The Strategy

If you have any questions about this experiment, or if you’re planning affiliate marketing content, please feel free to contact me at tbfuller@bu.edu or on Twitter at @ted_fuller

[This is Part 2 of a series of blog posts for WBUR BizLab’s Affiliate Marketing Project, funded by the Lenfest Institute.]

Construction of the Guides Website

To host our affiliate marketing experiments, our team developed a standalone site on WordPress. We called this WBUR Guides and integrated it as a subdomain of wbur.org at guides.wbur.org. In the individual Guides, we highlighted interesting and emerging products in the areas of health, fitness, gifts, travel, and culture. For each product we embedded affiliate links which sent users to external sites where interactions were tracked through CJ affiliate and Amazon’s Affiliate Program. When a reader navigated to an external site through our affiliate links, any purchase they made on that site generated an affiliate commission for WBUR.

We included a feedback form at the bottom of each guide and used the responses to help inform our content strategy.  The form included a field where respondents could enter their email to receive updates on future guides, effectively building out an email list for future promotions.  Finally, at the end of each guide we provided links to other guides to encourage continued browsing of our content.

Promotion Strategy

We promoted WBUR Guides through many different channels, some of which were ‘free’ channels owned and operated by WBUR, or WBUR’s ‘organic channels’ such as wbur.org.  Specifically, on wbur.org, we were able to promote within banner ads on the top of the homepage and within banners displayed in the news feed, using unsold ad inventory.

Another channel of promotion more closely tied to a readers organic experience on wbur.org was through in-article mentions. When an article was published that was closely tied to the topic of a guide, we would add in a text call-out that linked to the related guide. This method of posting links in relevant WBUR articles sent organic traffic from WBUR’s reader audience to our guides.

We also wanted to experiment with Twitter as a promotion channel. The official WBUR Twitter account cannot be used for non-news content, but fortunately WBUR has another Twitter account, WBURExtra, for any content falling outside of the news category. Although this account didn’t have as large a reach as WBUR’s primary Twitter account, testing promotions through WBUR Extra enabled us to gauge what levels of engagement might occur on the main account.

If your organization’s social media accounts are strictly limited to news coverage, it may be beneficial to create a similar ‘extra’ account.  Spinning up a secondary Twitter account does not require new content creation but instead can be populated with content by retweeting posts from other Twitter account holders in your organization.

Paid Social Strategy

Facebook Ads played a major role in this project; with limited promotion on wbur.org, we needed to use Facebook, and specifically paid Facebook ads, to drive traffic to our site, to test our content’s effectiveness at driving affiliate revenue. We hoped to use Facebook’s advanced targeting abilities to send ads to users who resembles the audience of wbur.org, with the assumption that this audience would be equally apt to click through and make a purchase.

With that in mind, we targeted Facebook ads towards individuals who had indicated NPR to be an interest of theirs, as well as individuals who had liked WBUR properties on Facebook such as On Point or Here and Now. We also tested targeting parameters like age, location and gender.

Additionally, we conducted tests around the creative style of our ads. For example, we knew that one pair of shoes was our best-selling item, so we A/B tested each available shoe color to determine which was most attractive to our audience (Brown).

After each ad ran, we reviewed results and iterated rapidly. Within two months, we tested a total of 104 distinct individual ads.

Tracking & Analytics

We prioritized implementing robust tracking as part of our web development effort. This ultimately led to better insights into which efforts drove the most engagement and financial results.  If tracking is not implemented at every step of the user experience, performance analysis will be based on aggregate data rather than focused on understanding how different components of the projects are working in relation to each other. 

As an analogy, consider inventory turnover in a typical store. If we only know that, on average, products will sell twice per week, then we only have an aggregate level for product performance. However, if we were able to understand product performance on a more granular level we can begin to see that the best-selling item sells 20 times a week and the worst selling item only sells once per month. With this type of insight it is easy to imagine how a store owner could make more informed decisions about which products are stocked. This is the type of granularity we have strived to produce in our analytics in order to determine, for example, the best performing promotional channels. This gives us insight into which tactics are working best so we know where our efforts are most productively spent.  From these insights, we iterate our approach to optimize the outcomes.

At the start of the project, reports from Google Analytics indicated how much traffic came to the site and reports from the affiliate networks indicated how much earnings we had accrued, but we lacked insight into which campaigns or promotions were driving or converting that traffic. To achieve those insights we leveraged UTM tags and Google Event Tracking to track the referral source and actions of each web user who visited a guide.

UTM Tagging

UTM tagging is when a web URL is modified with additional identifying information, allowing activity from users to be traced back to the promotion which sent them to our site. Tools such as Google Campaign URL Builder make creating URLs with UTM tags a breeze for marketers looking for more in depth analytics on how different campaigns are performing. Below is a screenshot of Google’s Campaign URL Builder, with our parameters filled out: 

For example, if you are running two campaigns, one on Twitter and one on Facebook, you can create two distinct URLs to the same website with different UTM tags and use your analytics platform to understand whether promotions on Twitter or Facebook are driving traffic more effectively to the website.  The concept of UTM tagging can be expanded to any medium where links are placed online. Any time you promote a link to your site, use UTM tracking so you can trace the source of your visitors to a specific promotion.

Defining our KPI as Product Clicks

In addition to tracking where users cam from, we were ultimately interested in how users behaved once they reach the site. To measure engagement with WBUR Guides content, we used clicks on suggested product links as our top key performance indicator(KPI).

Ideally we would have liked to use actual product purchases as our KPI to measure engagement but our tracking could not extend to the external sites where our affiliate links lead, so we were unable to tie purchases back to specific efforts at promotion. Therefore, the closest proxy we have to actual purchases is clicks on affiliate links leading off our website. 

To measure individual product clicks, we integrated event tracking on our website through Google Tag Manager.  Google Tag Manager allows us to define both tags and what behavior triggers those tags.  Tags and triggers work together to enable more granular tracking of events or actions taken on a website, whether that be a visitor to a site watching a video, filling out a form, or clicking a link.  By enabling tracking on these individual events we get a better sense of how individuals are engaging with our website. In WBUR Guides, we tracked each user who clicked a product link as an event. We then looked for promotion techniques which yielded audiences that generate a high proportion of product clicks.

By integrating UTM tags in marketing efforts and building custom events around actions which measure visitor engagement on the site, one can pin down performance metrics to see how audiences across various campaigns are engaging with the content.  The next section on controlled experimentation will demonstrate the power of this approach.

Designing Controlled Experiments

Our team went through a process of running controlled experiments in order to test the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, evaluating our ad copy, ad creative, promotional channels, and ad targeting. For anyone running experiments, know that there are a few critical steps that should be taken to ensure your experiments are run in a controlled manner, so that you get the data to answer your core question. The following example, testing the effect of including the WBUR logo in our Facebook ads, will demonstrate how a controlled experiment should be set up. 

It is crucial that every experiment has both a control group and an experimental group. Every aspect of the treatment (in this case the ad) should be exactly the same except for the one variable you are interested in testing, in our case the presence of the WBUR logo. 

In our test, we constructed two different ads: one for our experimental group with the WBUR logo and the same exact ad without the logo for our control group. By setting up the experiment this way we were able to attribute differences between the two groups to the presence of the logo, because the logo is the only difference between the two conditions.

In our experiment we targeted the ads in both the control group and experimental group to individuals within the Boston DMA (Designated Market Area), as we presumed this to be the area where the presence of the logo would have the largest effect.

The Ad Click Rate was very similar for both ads (1.49% and 1.69%) and this small difference could be attributed to chance. However, for individuals who clicked on the ad when the logo was present, the subsequent Product Click Rate to affiliate products on external sites, measured through our event tracking, was much higher (8.05%, compared to 5.49%).  This suggests that when the WBUR logo is present in a Facebook ad, individuals clicking on the ad are more likely to continue on to click from the WBUR Guides content to the product website. If we had not instrumented our ads for Product Click Rate and if we had changed multiple aspects of the ads, we would not be able to make this conclusion. 

Takeaways

Building a WordPress property to host your content is not where you should focus your development time. it is much more important to correctly instrument your ads and your site with the right UTM tags and event tracking. Without tracking you will not know why your project is (or isn’t) working. 

Running controlled experiments requires a scientific approach where only the variable of interest is manipulated. It is necessary to have a control group which provides a benchmark to gauge the effect of the variable of interest. The Facebook Ads Manager has built in A/B testing capabilities which will facilitate your process of running controlled experiments. 

Our next blog posts in this series on affiliate marketing will cover the results of WBUR Guides and prospects for the future of affiliate marketing within WBUR and public media.

If you haven’t already, check out our first blog post in this series: Exploring the Potential of Affiliate Marketing: The Challenge

Affiliate Marketing Overview

In an affiliate marketing model, online retailers pay commission on traffic or sales referrals from third-party websites like ours. When readers click affiliate links and subsequently make purchases, the affiliate site earns a commission on the sales. Commission rates typically range between 2-10% of the purchase price. 

In publishing, a prominent example of this is The Wirecutter, a New York Times company which highlights various product categories for review and comparison, all with links to purchase on external sites. Nationally-known media organizations like CNN, USA Today, and TIME all engage with affiliate marketing models.

A report from BusinessInsider.com describes how affiliate marketing has been generating increasing revenue in recent years and now drives as many e-commerce orders in the US as email marketing.  Each of those channels accounts for 16% of all US e-commerce orders. Moreover, approximately 15% of the digital media industry’s revenue now comes from affiliate marketing.

As the use of affiliate marketing has continued to grow and become more prominent with many major publishers engaging in this space, BizLab decided to explore the potential of affiliate marketing within WBUR, with grant support from The Lenfest Institute.

WBUR’s initial exploration into affiliate marketing came in the form of book links.  Anytime a book is mentioned on-air and ends up in an article, affiliate links direct users to those books on Amazon for purchase. WBUR has been participating in Amazon’s Affiliate Program for many years. 

An example of an affiliate revenue generating page is the article “These Are The Best Cookbooks Of 2018, According To Chef Kathy Gunst,” by Here & Now resident Chef Kathy Gunst, spotlighting the best cookbooks of 2018. This single page generated over $1000 in affiliate revenue commissions. Book links led to approximately $10,000 in annual revenue in fiscal year 2019.

These results from book linking spurred continued exploration of opportunities with affiliate marketing at WBUR in the BizLab.

Affiliate Marketing Platforms

Our exploration into affiliate marketing led us to CJ Affiliate and Amazon’s Affiliate Program, two of the largest affiliate platforms available to marketers.  To use an analogy, you can think of CJ Affiliate as a matchmaker. The platform connects brands to advertisers in order to facilitate the relationships underlying the affiliate marketing model and provide the mechanics for tracking performance of affiliate marketing efforts and awarding commissions. When we link to products with CJ, we link to products found on individual brand and commerce websites, not to CJ.com. 

CJ’s affiliate network generally offers higher commissions than Amazon’s Affiliate Program, but the opportunities are more niche as they are tied to specific brands.

On the other hand, although Amazon’s Affiliate Program generally offers lower commissions, there is a very broad opportunity to earn affiliate commissions through nearly all of Amazon’s vast array of products.  An additional benefit of Amazon’s Affiliate Program is that affiliate marketers are credited and receive commissions for any purchase their outbound traffic makes on Amazon, not just products reviewed or linked to originally by the affiliate marketers content.

To clarify, if an individual visitor to an affiliate marketing site clicked on a product link to Amazon but then instead navigated to and purchased another product unrelated to the original product linked to, the affiliate which sent the visitor to Amazon would still be credited with a commission on that sale regardless of whether the item purchased was linked to by the affiliate or not.

One of the benefits of engaging with both CJ Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate Program is more diverse brand affiliations. In instances where all of products promoted in an article link to Amazon, we have received feedback from readers indicating distaste towards driving traffic solely to Amazon, so CJ’s platform allow us to diversify the sites we link users to, offering them more options.

Challenge

Initial discussions at WBUR with editorial staff highlighted a conflict of interest between the affiliate marketing experiment and the preservation of WBUR’s journalistic integrity.  The existence and importance of the ‘Editorial Firewall’ within WBUR stems from editorial concerns regarding journalistic integrity, so project guardrails were quickly defined early on.  WBUR’s news and editorial leadership was mainly concerned with ensuring that audience members would not perceive the affiliate marketing content as WBUR journalism. Other concerns at the station focused on being transparent with WBUR’s audience and avoid the perception of ‘pushing products.’

With that in mind, we agreed to the following:

• We would call our affiliate content “WBUR Guides” instead of “WBUR Recommends” to avoid the sense that we are guaranteeing or backing products. 
• Our content creators would be referred to as “Outside Contributors” rather than “Authors.” This avoids the perception that they are journalists. For the same reason, we refer to each individual piece as a “Guide” rather than an “Article.”
• To ensure transparency, each guide would include a disclaimer noting that the station may earn an affiliate commission from their purchases and including a link to learn more.
• WBUR Guides would have its own web domain, guides.wbur.org.
• We would only link to Guides through these approved methods:
  • On www.wbur.org, unsold banner ad space. 
  • On www.wbur.org, using text blocks with links within news articles reporting on closely related topics.
  • On Twitter, via @WBURExtra, not the main newsroom Twitter account @WBUR.

A critical component we integrated on the site was the disclaimer within every guide.  This disclaimer was meant to protect WBUR and tied back into the notion of preserving journalistic integrity by being transparent with WBUR’s audience about the potential for earning a commission off purchases made through our links.

What happened?

For anyone interested in testing an affiliate marketing model within their organization (or for those just plain interested!), be sure to check out our other blog posts in this series.  Additional posts will cover the strategy of building and promoting the affiliate marketing website, the numbers in terms of conversions down our marketing funnel and revenue generated, and the future examining ways in which affiliate marketing can continue to grow within the organization.

Date

Tuesday, July 23, 2019, 3-4pm EDT

Speakers

• Matt Aufiero, WBUR BizLab
• Brendan Glynn, WLRN
• Anne Galloway, VTDigger

Recording

http://https://youtu.be/tEyQMSo-AXo

As outlined in my last blog post, I spent my summer at WBUR following an iterative design process to design an experience that compels users to purchase books.  In this blog post, I discuss the findings from an experiment to determine if this experience drives affiliate marketing revenue. 

Experiment Design

After designing a new user experience for a digital bookshelf, featuring the books WBUR’s programming talks about on-air, in order to evaluate its effectiveness as a revenue channel, I compared how it performed in comparison to WBUR’s other webpages that have book content. To do this, I made some minor improvements to two additional webpage types by adding book imagery and more links to Amazon. Then I launched Facebook ads to all three types of pages, targeted at people who like WBUR and books. 

Condition 1 – Articles about Books

Anytime a book is mentioned on-air or an author is interviewed, there is an article on our website with this content. I selected four of our recent articles about books and added some additional book imagery and links to Amazon, and created a Facebook ad that appeared similar to a news article in a Facebook newsfeed.

Before	After	Facebook Ad

Condition 2 – The Summer Reading List

The On Point team published a Summer Reading List in June 2018 that contained several lists of books recommended by media personalities. We had seen this page get notable traffic in June, and because it has many links to books, it is the most similar page to the bookshelf, but it lacks the rich content and additional information shown on the bookself page. Before launching Facebook ads for this page, I added more book imagery to this page as well.

Before	After	Facebook Ad

Condition 3 – The WBUR Bookshelf

The design of the bookshelf was based off of several phases of user feedback. The main inspiration for the bookself design was to replicate the experience of browsing for books that were hand selected by hosts of shows. The bookself we launched is a high-fidelity prototype in the sense that none of the content is dynamic. This is important to note because to launch the bookself in a sustainable way, we will need to invest time and resources into building it from scratch.

Facebook Ad 1	Facebook Ad 2	Facebook Ad 3

We ran three variations of Facebook ads for the bookshelf, to maximize traffic.

Results

The Facebook ads pointing to each page type ran for approximately 7 days, and during that time the different pages got thousands of pageviews. We anticipated, because the bookshelf had the features users were looking for, that it would get the most traffic, interaction, and revenue. This is not what happened. While the bookshelf got the most traffic, indicating interest, it did not generate as many click throughs or purchases as we’d hoped for.

The standout winner in this comparison of the page types is the Summer Reading List page. This page had an extremely high click through rate over to amazon (59.5%) and the conversion of those clicks into purchases was also higher than the bookshelf (5.7%). In our 7 day experiment, the list earned WBUR $100, while the bookshelf earned $9.11 and the book articles earned $2.35. The conversion rate is significantly higher (at a 99% confidence interval) when compared to the  bookshelf. 

Discussion and Recommended Next Steps

These results have generated a lot of new ideas for where to take this concept and how to translate this into actionable next steps for WBUR. As a designer, I have many ideas for how to improve upon the bookshelf design. I’m also a practitioner and understand the realities of limited time and budget, so want to balance my recommendations for the best design direction versus the most practical next step for a public radio station.

Beyond this experiment, there is a larger context: the WBUR site has hundreds of links to purchase books and over the years the institutional knowledge of how to create Amazon affiliate tags had been lost. When I started my fellowship, I worked with WBUR staff to ensure affiliate tags were on all of the Amazon books links found on our site. This change in workflow impacted many pages, and will continue to have an impact. In the last two months since I’ve joined BizLab, WBUR raised $2,488.41 through the Amazon Affiliate’s program! Average earnings before I arrived were $410 a month.

What should WBUR do going forward, based on what we learned from the prototype, the experiment, and the change in tagging?

Here are my recommendations on how we can improve.

1. We know that the embedded Amazon search widget (that allows searches for Amazon books on our site) is beneficial. In interviews, our users appreciated knowing that they can support their favorite radio station while shopping on Amazon, and this mitigated their hesitation over supporting Amazon instead of a local retailer. The metrics from our bookshelf page confirm active engagement with the search widget — it accounts for 40% of purchases and 10% of click throughs from the bookshelf page. My first recommendation is to include this widget on all WBUR pages related to books, accompanied with messaging about their purchases benefitting WBUR. For example:
2. I also propose that we create more book lists and present them in a list-like format while retaining some important visual elements from the bookshelf. Users liked seeing book covers and photos of hosts on the page. A/B tests can be conducted to confirm whether or not it will impact Amazon purchases. As long as these elements are not preventing Amazon purchases, I think it is beneficial to include them because it’s what our users want.An advantage to creating book lists on a periodic basis, versus building a bookshelf that automatically aggregates books, is that the technical development effort is much lower. On a quarterly, or monthly basis, a radio programs team can create a quick list using existing tools, and likely replicate the impressive revenue increase we saw this summer.

Although adding book cover images to the book articles and reading list did not increase Amazon purchases, I think more testing should be done before we can draw conclusions. I say this for 2 main reasons:

• Due to time constraints, the new / old versions of the articles and reading lists were not tested simultaneously. The original versions without book cover images were launched first, and then entirely replaced with the new versions. Timing can be impacting conversion rates here.
• During interviews, our users expressed a preference for pages with more book cover images.