Do you have a site or service that you think could benifit from increasing the number of countries and affiliate programs it uses? Contact us to see how GeoRiot can help your site or service become more effecient with it's international traffic.
Ski Movie Music is a website that simply lists the songs, artists and albums that make up the memorable soundtracks for ski films. Each song, artist and album listed has an affiliate link into either the iTunes or Amazon Digital Music catalog. It is these deep links that provide the commission to make the site profitable.
Just as skiing and the films exploring the sport are international the traffic to SkiMovieMusic.com was also international. Even though the site was English based, English speaking countries only accounted for roughly fifty percent of the monthly traffic. Visitors would routinely pour in from over 100 countries in order to peruse the soundtrack lists.
The site quickly became the defacto standard for skiers looking for new music and grew quickly as word spread. The site saw triple digit growth year after year. Unfortunately the commissions weren't growing at the same rate.
It was quite a shock when the site's proprietor learned that the deep links set up using the iTunes affiliate program through LinkShare were only generating revenue on a third of the traffic that he had so diligently grown. Although total traffic was blowing up the traffic was becoming more and more global and the percent of US traffic wasn't on par with the rest of the site.
After some concerned research and some frustrating email exchanges the problem and solution came into focus for the people responsible behind the skiing soundtrack site. Although the iTunes Store is available in over 70 countries the links on the site only generated commissions for people that had clicked through and had US accounts. Visitors from other countries that clicked then bought weren't generating anyone commissions. The iTunes Store actually uses four separate affiliate networks to cover over 20 different countries. Each country is a different store and requires a separate and specific link.
Ski Movie Music now uses GeoRiot's service for all of the site's deep links and as a result capitalizes on approximately 90% of its traffic. Commission checks now roll in from all over the world and growth in site traffic is much more closely correlated with growing revenue.