• Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Contents

How to Earn More Affiliate Revenue on YouTube with Choice Pages

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Contents

We’ve long believed that Choice Pages are an awesome way for creators to boost their revenue and diversify their affiliate partnerships. Armando Ferreira shared a case study with us that yielded exciting results (more than doubling his revenue!) But like many of you, we wanted more data. We wanted to know that his experience wasn’t an exception.

So we set up a Choice Page experiment with other YouTubers to see if we could prove that Armando’s experience wasn’t a fluke.

Turns out we were able to consistently produce amazing results!  Over 11 separate tests, we saw an average of 2.2x improvement in earnings-per-click with some clients seeing as much as 4.2x lift!

This implies that Armando was not alone, and the evidence is clear: on YouTube, Choice Pages can help you earn more than just straight Amazon affiliate links!

Ready to see all the delicious data? Read on!

Our Thesis:

We hypothesized that YouTubers linking to camera gear can earn more by providing Choice Pages (that include a B&H button) than just using an intelligent link directly to Amazon.

To reduce variables, we attempted to mimic Armando’s case study as closely as possible. So we kept the Choice Pages the same: two buttons, with Amazon and B&H as the options.

How to test Choice Pages on your YouTube channel

While we’ve outlined the exact steps in our “Experimenting with Choice Pages, Step by Step” Guide, here’s an overview of the step-by-step testing process:

1/ Set up Groups and Affiliate Overrides (3 groups and 2 Amazon IDs)
2/ Identify which links to test with (5-15 links with significant traffic).
3/ Clone the original links twice: one becomes a Choice Page, another for the direct-to-Amazon link.
4/ Edit the original link so it splits US traffic into the two cloned links.
5/ Wait for enough traffic through the links
6/ Run reports and analyze results

To ensure we could properly isolate the clicks and commissions for each side of that A/B test, we’d create a few Geniuslink groups, and two new Amazon Associate tracking IDs to use as affiliate overrides.

As for the links to be used, for many clients, we’d just grab the top 5-15 most trafficked links in their account from the past two months. A few folks asked us to simply convert all the links from their ‘My Gear’ text block instead, which also works.

Technically speaking, we’d set those existing links up as Advanced Links, with an A/B split test for US traffic: 50% of US traffic would hit a Choice Page of the product, and the other 50% would have the typical straight-to-Amazon experience.

Suggestions to the Rescue

In the early stages of this experiment, I was searching for the product links on B&H manually, saving them all in a spreadsheet, and building out the Choice Pages one by one. However, fortune was on my side. After about a month, the team released our Suggestions feature, which makes assembling a Choice Page lightning fast!

Participants:

We compiled a list of our clients with YouTube channels and contacted many of those with links to camera gear. Below are the 10 amazing people who participated in our experiment!

Pete at Gaming Careers

Tutorials on Livestreaming, Content Creation, and Growing Your Audience on Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook Gaming.

Chrystopher at YCImaging

Here on this channel I detail my creative journey through creating music videos, behind the scenes, and filmmaking tips + tricks!

Pierre Lambert

I got an engineering degree for fun. Now I’m into sharing my Real passion/job/life: Photography.

Chris Brockhurst
Sony cameras, Canon cameras, all the cameras. Probably some short films too!

Andrew & Denae

Denae and Andrew are a husband and wife photography team. On our channel we focus on digital photographic art with an analog heart.

Curtis Judd

Learn lighting and sound for video–I post a new video every week covering lighting, sound, and camera gear for producing better video and film. Be sure to subscribe and get the latest updates to help you improve your video production value!

Joe Allam

TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY VLOGS + CINEMATICS
Hey there, I’m an independent creative from London making weekly videos about creativity and travel with a heavy slant towards photography and cinematic vibes!

Jake Rich

TRAVEL – CREATE – FILMMAKE – EDUCATE
Australian Filmmaker. I create video content for beginner filmmakers, GoPro enthusiasts, travellers and creators.

Justin at Dunna Did It
Hi! I’m Dunna! I make videos about photography, videography, motivation, and just having fun. On my channel, you’ll find gear reviews, tutorials, tips and tricks, vlogs and more!

Justin & Mike Brown at Primal Video

Two Brothers: Justin’s the ‘video guy’, with top-level credits and distribution strategy on international film, documentary & extreme sports productions. Mike’s the ‘process & strategy’ side of things, a reformed accountant, Business Development exec and marketer.

First Batch of Results

About six weeks after assembling Choice Pages for our first few participants, the results started to trickle in. Each new data set confirmed our thesis! Choice Pages helped these folks earn more money. Check out this choice page case study of our client Granger McCollough.

Below you’ll see columns for the number of Links used in the experiment, how many weeks the experiment ran for, the total number of clicks through those links, the % improvement in the total earnings-per-click into the Choice Page (Amazon + B&H combined), as well as the EPC improvement for Amazon alone.

We’ve obfuscated the results for each channel to keep this sensitive info anonymous. Explanations for some of these results are outlined below, so if something doesn’t quite make sense, it soon will!

Average EPC change for all seven clients: +152% lift, or 2.5x!

Channel A and C saw a decrease in performance with the Choice Pages it’s been a challenge to explain why. For Channel A, the client mentioned that the links were buried in much older videos and not seeing a ton of traffic. As for Channel C, due to a reporting issue (explained below), the direct-to-Amazon tracking ID received three times the amount of traffic as the Choice Page tracking ID. This low volume of only 500 clicks made a poor sample size!

Channel D is an outlier for a different reason. Once we saw their results we learned they were getting a TON of B&H traffic from outside the Choice Pages. We didn’t prepare to filter these out, so we omitted these totals from our final tally to avoid throwing everything off. Instead, we calculated our total using the change to their EPC from Amazon alone, and still found that the Choice Pages enjoyed a higher EPC and conversion, even without the B&H commissions added in!

And then we have the best kind of outlier. Channel F managed to get incredibly lucky and pull in some huge commissions from both Amazon and B&H. Five times the EPC of the direct-to-Amazon links! These numbers seemed too good to be true, but in all our searching we couldn’t find any errors or inaccuracies. The stars just seemed to align for this client!

Iterating on our process

When this first crop of results came in, we realized we had made a mistake in how we set up the test. As a result, the Control tracking ID (direct-to-Amazon links) were seeing anywhere between 30-60% more traffic than the Test tracking ID (Choice Pages). This muddied our results a bit, by seemingly decreasing the EPC for the direct-to-Amazon traffic, and preventing our Choice Pages from seeing the amount of volume we would’ve liked.

Now that we could see this error, we made the necessary adjustments for any new participants.

Second Batch of Results

Once we cleaned up our testing process, we started to see closer to a 1:1 parity of click totals between groups (meaning a more accurate EPC in the Control group, which had previously been inflated by a larger number of less-qualified clicks).

Here’s what we saw:

[!] = Second experiment cohort, with improved reporting.

Average EPC change for these four clients: +72% lift, or 1.72x!

Let’s combine both tables to get the big picture.

[!] = Second experiment cohort, with improved reporting. With all results combined and averaged we get a grand total EPC lift of +123% or 2.2x!

We also saw Amazon conversion rates triple on average, with one client seeing an improvement of 9x!

Feedback and Testimonials

Understandably, our clients were pretty enthusiastic about these results. Just about all of them saw a meaningful lift in their earnings-per-click. Here’s what they had to say:

Channel D: “This is great news and as a bonus will save me a ton of time … And, I have also started working with a couple of additional retailers … So I’m all on board!”

Channel E: (after the second round of testing): “Crazy how a few tweaks can increase things eh? Since changing all my top performing links to Choice Pages, affiliate sales with B&H have more than doubled!”

Channel C: “Choice Pages help me give a choice as to what shop people prefer to support and also helps with the affiliate disclaimers. It’s a no brainer to use!”

Channel J: “The ultimate aim for me was to provide my audience with the best experience when clicking through one of my links, which meant more choice of where they could shop from. It’s a massive bonus that implementing this change has increased my earnings too and I’m now in the process of moving all my top performing links over to Choice Pages.”

Channel B: “…the thing I like most about the Choice Page is that I don’t have to worry about adding the [Amazon] disclaimers … So everything can be really clean… I definitely consider the choice route a success and, in fact, already went in and moved all links (with traffic) to be Choice Pages. Your technology is such a huge value.”

Channel I: “…that’s quite a difference there! Awesome to see the positive results from the Choice Pages so far! …I’m interested to see what the data says after [an extended] testing period!”

Channel G: “How can we shift ALL of my links to Choice Pages?”

Channel A: (our client who saw a decrease in EPC):
“…either way, I’m a fan of offering choice to people regardless of whether it’s bringing more revenue — I just think the functionality offers so much more usability for people.”

Channel F: (our lucky star): “My experience with Choice Pages has been really great overall. I love the idea of giving more options for people who prefer one retailer over another. I love giving people the option to price check. I love the aesthetic of the Choice Pages, it looks really simple and professional. And on top of all of that, it increased revenue overall. To me, that means I was missing out on certain commissions before and Geniuslink (like always) swooped in to make sure I was getting all of the affiliate commission that I could be.”

Observations

The results make a convincing argument that Choice Pages can outperform direct-to-Amazon affiliate links for recommending camera related gear on YouTube.

We hoped to prove that diversifying your affiliate revenue streams helps you earn more from many sources.

However, during this particular experiment, the most meaningful change seemed to be a boost to Amazon conversion and commission. It’s as if comparison shopping right there on the landing page can bring visitors closer to converting on the spot by building momentum from checking other options—something often referred to as “micro conversions.”

That said, we encourage you to try this out for yourself!

If you are not fully convinced by our case study you can perform your own Choice Pages experiment by following the process outlined in this step by step guide. Give it a go and record the results you see. If you do this, please let us know how it went! We’re eager to collect more data on this promising thesis and welcome your input.

But, if you like what you’ve read, you can simply convert your top-performing links to Choice Pages right away and keep an eye on their performance over six weeks! We recommend taking advantage of our Suggestions feature to make it an easy task in your path to hopefully boosting your commissions by 2x!

Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

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