What Are the 3 Clicks?

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Maybe you are familiar with this rule of thumb, maybe not; but the basic philosophy is to never put more than three clicks between your visitors and the product purchasing page. This can be accomplished by a variety of ways: landing pages, search boxes, direct linking, and "get it" buttons, all of which have proven to be successful in converting browsers to buyers.

Landing Pages: As an example, let's take my employer, Jamba GmbH. It has quite a large product catalog of around 34,000 SKUs which can be located on the www.jamster.com portal – some closer to the top, some buried deep inside the portal pages. This extremely large and varied product catalog helps us to capture the long tail of purchasers. However, once visitors land inside the portal, such an array of choices can overwhelm them and often results in surfing instead of purchasing products. Therefore, for affiliates and campaigns, we create landing pages which have a limited number of top-selling products to choose from at the beginning, or the page may ask them to sign up and then choose their products at the end.

Search Boxes: After you have a landing page, the next step in monetizing browsers is to try and capture those visitors already psychologically further along the purchasing path. The idea here is that your best-converting shoppers are already searching for you and they already know what they want to purchase; therefore, we recently added search boxes onto our standard banners (these standard banners still link to a landing page, not the portal). With these embedded search boxes, the visitors who are ready to purchase can plug in the name of the artist, song or game and have that unique SKU's purchasing page returned to them immediately instead of going to the landing page. This has resulted in almost double the conversion rate than we had before because we have covered both ends of the purchasing continuum – those purchasers who know exactly what they want and those who need to be directed to a more choice-constrained landing page. In other words, it enables us to leverage our large product catalog, while still (in both cases) keeping the visitor less than three clicks from the products they want.

Direct Linking: Another technique that some affiliates take advantage of is the ability to use the product catalog to directly link the visitor to the exact purchasing page of the product within our portal. Direct linking has proven itself again and again as the ideal way to help turn browsers into buyers. The reason? Direct linking allows visitors to get what they want in less than three clicks. Linking to the artist's page is better than linking to the home page of the portal, but the direct linking to a specific, unique product is always the most successful method. Therefore, any merchant that has a wide and varied catalog should enable affiliates to set up some sort of direct product linking capability, and those affiliates that are savvy should take advantage of this capability so they capture those visitors already in the mood for buying and who are Googling directly for what they want to purchase.

Get-It Button: Another technique that is very simple yet very powerful is the ability to make sure that visitors have a chance to purchase your products anywhere and everywhere. It is amazing how often affiliates only put a "get it" button on a page buried within their site. It makes much more sense to put this button up front and also on any page that a visitor has surfed to in order to gather more information about the product.

These techniques can all be leveraged by both affiliates and by merchants to help increase sales and increase conversion rates. Remember, tweaking your conversion rate only slightly has a strong multiplier impact on your sales and revenue numbers and is the ideal way to take advantage of the traffic that you already have today.

Cecily Robyn Lough is online Marketing manager for Jamster USA in Berlin.

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