One of the things we have noticed at lot of so far this year with new site audits, is sites that have included links to third party services. Now while this tends to be common in the insurance and finance space, the way they are being used is not helping you, the customer or the third party.
So what do we mean by a third party link? In essence a third party link is a link from your website to another company’s services that they are offering on your website. So for example, it could be that you are a local insurance broker but you don’t offer your own travel insurance. So, you have set up an third party link direct to someone else who can fulfill that product for you and pay you a commission.
This in itself is not an issue, there are a huge number of sites that do this. The problems we are seeing are in customer expectation. Let’s look at a few issues.
Direct linking to third party site from your navigation
A customer lands on your site and sees you offer travel insurance and they see it in your main navigation. They click on it and suddenly a new window is opened and they are now on a different site in a different look and feel. Not a good experience.
Managing expectation is a great way to make sure your customer knows what is happening and improve conversion. If they get confused or lost, they will not ask for help. They will click off your site and find someone else.
Our suggestion – rather than directly linking off the site, maybe add an internal site page all about travel insurance and include some information about the third party. In this way, when they click on your third party link – they know what is happening and you will be more likely to secure the sale.
Adding third party links to your homepage
This is similar to the above – links or buttons that take the user who you have spent so long getting to your site is then whisked off to someone else’s. We understand why but your customer will be confused that they have been sent elsewhere. Make sure you explain where the customer is going. Again our view is that you want to send them to an internal page first before sending them off. This helps in three ways:
- helps put the customer at ease and give them the understanding of what is happening
- it helps search engines rank your site higher and on topic. Google for example has a term for sites that a simply link off to other sites – thin affiliates. They hate these sites with a vengeance as they feel they add no value to the customer journey. You need to add value, maybe have a page that explains about their product and why you are partnering with them. Do this in your own words or have something written for you (we do offer content writing services). Do not simply lift content from other sites – even partner sites – it could damage the both of you in terms of the search engines.
- it also helps keep on top of your relationships. If you have all your travel insurance links going to one page and then link out from that one page – if you need to change that relationship at any time, you only have to edit one page. Simples!
We hope this helps you next time you consider adding a new product or service that you are going to use and link off to someone else. It is worthwhile doing but it is worth doing it properly. It will benefit everyone in the process.
