Maximize your profits with a backbutton redirect – script included.

A clever affiliate marketer always takes every step possible, to increase the ROI of their campaigns. In the competitive world of affiliate marketing, there isn’t any other way to survive anyways. You have to stay on top of your game.

If you don’t squeeze every last drop of revenue from your campaigns, someone else will, which will give them a competitive advantage against yourself. Then it’s just a question of bidding higher than you … and your traffic is gone.

Today, I’m gonna talk about a simple and effective trick, that is very popular, but still overlooked by many. It’s called the Back-Button Redirect.

WHAT IS THE BACKBUTTON REDIRECT ACTUALLY?

Imagine that you are browsing some site and from some reason, for example when you are not interested in an offer you’ve been presented with, you decide to go back to the previous page. You hit the “back” arrow inside your browser and, in a normal situation, your browser will simply return to the previous page you’ve been at.

Now, what a Back-Button Redirect script does, is that it rewrites the browsers “history” with an url you can specify. So when someone hits the “back” arrow, it will load the url you’ve specified, instead of actually returning to the previously visited url. You are basically making the browser “think” that a particular URL is the last one it loaded.

By installing such a script into your Landing Page, you are gaining one more chance to show something to the user – new ad, send them to other sites … more on that later.

Backbuttons work on desktop traffic too, but they are used the most with mobile traffic and especially Android. The reason is simple : every Android phone has some sort of a backbutton next to the home button, it’s a natural part of the navigation of this OS. As a result, Android users are used to this functionality and click it very often.

TIP: Some traffic networks are not exactly happy about the use of backbutton redirects, but majority of them only has problems with the “chained” ones. This is a setup, where one backbutton follows another one, which makes it impossible to escape the chain. Stay away from this and you will be fine with most networks. Be extra cautious when working with Facebook or Google Adwords, they do not allow this method for example and it could get you banned.

WHY IS THIS GOOD AND WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH THAT TRAFFIC?

When someone visits your landing page, but doesn’t like what you have to offer, they hit the backbutton and they are gone, the visit is lost. With a backbutton script, you have one more shot at converting them somehow.

There are several options for you to consider here, the most popular are :

1. Sending the surfer to the offer directly anyways. Even thou the Landing Page (LP) didn’t grab their attention, maybe the offer itself will. Doesn’t even have to be the original offer, try a similar one too. This is probably the most used method.

2. Sending the surfer to another Landing Page. It can even be a more aggressive LP for the same offer. People do this a lot with AntiVirus offers for example – first LP suggest that you might be infected … the next one steps it up, giving you a clear warning that you are infected for sure 🙂

3. Sending the surfer to a Landing Page for a completely different vertical, promoting and offer from that vertical. The theory here is simple, if the surfer isn’t interested in a particular vertical … a different one might work.

4. Selling that visit to a traffic network – many POPs that traffic networks sell, are actually backbutton redirects 🙂 It would be a good idea to talk with a traffic network before doing this, not all of them will be happy about it.

5. Using the visits to grow traffic of your sites in a related niche. In case you are running a site that offers some value, you can grow the user base this way. Just make sure the niches match at least partially.

6. You can also use the backbutton script to load an email collection box or a newsletter signup form – offer the visitors something in return for subscribing, then monetize them later on.

7. Send the traffic to a “smartlink” type of affiliate network. These networks utilize special algorithms that split traffic based on certain criteria and send it to offers that are most likely to convert such traffic. This can work pretty with some traffic – for example Mobile Carrier Traffic (3G).

As you can see, there is a lot of ways to monetize your traffic with a backbutton redirect script, I listed the most used ones but there are obviously more…

TIP: When using a backbutton redirect, create separate campaigns in your tracker for this traffic. In case you would use the same tracking link, the stats would become skewed a lot. Simply treat this traffic as a new source. I will explain this more below, along with giving the instructions on how to install it.

HOW MUCH CAN A BACKBUTTON REDIRECT IMPROVE THE ROI?

This is a tough question, since every campaign is different, but I can tell you what I have seen with my own campaigns obviously.

Looking at my stats from yesterday : 10% extra revenue from a campaign is pretty standard, but I also have a campaign where backbuttons made me as much as 25% extra revenue. When looking at more historical data, I can see some campaigns, where the backbuttons boosted my revenue by more than 30% – but this is definitely not the standard.

A safe estimation would be approximately 10% – 15% extra revenue, when utilizing the backbutton redirects properly.

In many cases, I used to run campaigns at 0% ROI initially, because I knew that the backbuttons would bring in additional 20%+ … so if the scale was there, why not?

One way or another, even if you don’t reach super high % of revenue boost, it’s still “Free” money … running campaigns without a backbutton redirect means leaving money on the table. Especially with GEOs from the less developed part of the world, where they still work pretty well.

WHERE TO GET SUCH A SCRIPT FROM?

Since I’m a good guy, I’m gonna give it to you right now 🙂 This is a simple one that works well, you need to set it up in 2 steps.

1. Step : Copy this code into the Landing Page, you can put it in the <head> </head> part of the source code. This is a simple html version, it works even on a CDN.

---

<script>
function init() {
setTimeout(function(){window.scrollTo(0,1)},0);
}

window.history.pushState(‘back.html’, ‘back’, ‘back.html’);
window.history.pushState(‘index.html’, ‘Index’, ‘index.html’);
window.addEventListener(“popstate”, function(e) {
if(document.URL.indexOf(“back.html”) >= 0){
document.location.href = document.location;
}

});
</script>

---

2. Step: Create a back.html file and put it in the same directory as the LP. Copy the code below into the back.html file.

---

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<head>
<script>

document.location.href = “http://redirecturl.com”;

</script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

---

Replace “redirecturl.com” with the real URL you want to redirect the traffic to.

That’s it, simple as that 🙂

HOW TO TRACK THIS “EXTRA” TRAFFIC?

Many people are confused when handling backbutton redirect traffic. The reason is that majority of affiliates send it to the same campaign URL as they used in case of the original campaign. This way, the traffic numbers effectively duplicates and the CTRs are through the roof.

What I recommend personally, is to create a separate campaign for this and simply send the backbutton redirect traffic to it.

Example : Let’s say I’m promoting some Carrier Billing offer in Germany, so I would create 2 campaigns in my tracking (Voluum for example). I would name one of them DE-Carrier-X, the second one would be De-Carrier-X-Backbutton.

The tracking url of the first one would be used at the traffic source. The tracking url of the second one would go straight to the “back.html” file. This way, I will keep the original campaign in-tact for optimization purposes and I will have one more where I see the extra revenue.

Ok guys, I think I mentioned all that was important, so let’s end the article here. Hopefully you will find it useful.

Thanks for reading!

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