All kinds of products and services are being offered with online coupons. They are a great way to entice customers to make a purchase. You know if they take advantage of the coupons it’s because they are ready to take one important step: buy your products. To take it even further, placing your coupon codes at coupon websites can increase your sales significantly.
But it raises an interesting question: how do these coupon code websites make any money? There are a few ways in which they can make money from their sites which will be explored here.
Advertising
Websites that offer online coupons often generate a fair amount of traffic. Therefore, they can place advertising on their websites. It can be very easy to attract advertisers when they show their traffic statistics. Advertisers can also deduce that these types of websites attract not only visitors but buyers. As stated before, people that use coupon code websites have already whipped out their credit cards and are simply looking for ways to save some money before making the purchase. There are ad networks that match website owners with advertisers. Of course, they take a cut of the advertising revenue. You can also set up a page for advertisers, letting them know your terms, the types of ads you accept, your prices or how to contact you for pricing.
Adsense and Other Cost Per Click Programs
Another possible way that these coupon websites can make money is to include cost per click ads. They accomplish this through ad networks such as Google Adsense. When a visitor to a website clicks on ads that are displayed on the site, the website owner receives part of the advertising revenue. Google handles the entire exchange between advertisers (via its Adwords program) and website owners. Some disadvantages in using programs like these, is that the ad network takes your visitors away from your site when they click on an ad. Also, the ads that are shown are not always relevant to the content being shown. Coupon websites have to weigh whether they are receiving enough in revenue to make these disadvantages worth putting up with.
Affiliate Marketing
Online coupon websites can also make money using affiliate marketing. This is a form of revenue where major vendors such as Amazon.com and Target.com, vendors that sign up to affiliate networks, etc., allow affiliates to place links or banners on their websites. When a customer clicks on those links and purchases a product, the website owner receives a commission on that sale. These vendors frequently offer coupon codes that they make available to affiliates. The websites then display the codes on their websites along with their affiliate id in the link to the product. Some coupon codes are specific to the affiliate, whereas others will require the customer to click using a code and apply the coupon code either manually or programmatically.
