You 100% NEED to use tracking links for your OnlyFans profile
This week’s lesson is going to be simple, yet so pivotal in your data-collecting journey if I may say so myself ❤️
Most of us agree that a healthy OF profile page conversion rate is somewhere between 1% and 3%. I’d also venture to guess that most of us have also experienced that moment where we calculate our own conversion rate and become frustrated when we realize that it’s nowhere near 1%, let alone 3%.
And that begins the crux of today’s lesson: Your conversion rate might be low because you might be calculating it from an unreliable source (aka the statistics page).
You need to be using tracking links. Seriously. If you’re not using tracking links, you’re going to regret it in the future when you realize how important tracking links are.
Let me back up. Long ago when I was a sweet little OF marketing newbie, I didn’t even know that tracking links existed. Though, it doesn’t help that OnlyFans puts this feature in the most ridiculously undiscoverable place. However, that is besides the point.
Every week, I checked the statistics page and looked at visitors / guests / users and compared that data with subscriber data to follow along with the page’s conversion rate and growth.
One day, I was so disappointed to see that the page was perpetually converting horribly. Very below average. Something like 0.1%, which is waaaaay below the estimated industry average of somewhere between 1% to 3%. The conversion rate I was looking at had me questioning my experience as a marketer. My ego was bruised. How could it be so low? Wtf was I doing wrong? How is that even possible when the page is top <1%?!
Because the conversion rate seemed so low, I kept doing research on what I could do marketing/strategy-wise to get the conversion rate up. Then, I learned what tracking links were: you can generate a unique link to your OF profile, and then see exactly how many clicks that link gets and how many people buy from that specific link. (Go to edit profile -> tracking links -> create link ).
So, if you generate a unique link for your Instagram, you can see how many people come to OF from Instagram and how many people buy from Instagram.
After learning this, I plugged in a unique link for each social media platform, in hopes of being able to figure out more about why the conversion rate was so low. I wanted to see which social media platform was causing the average down, or if they all were performing horribly.
With all the links swapped, I waited a few weeks and used ONLY tracking links - there was no promotion anywhere that had a normal OF link — that’s important!
When I checked in on the results, I was shocked and deeply confused: according to the tracking links, each social media platform was converting between ~ 0.5% and 3%. The average conversion rate from tracking links was around 1.5% conversion rate, while the statistics page was showing 0.1%.
I reached out to OF support to ask why there was such a big difference — a 0.1% conversion rate and a 1.5% conversion rate is a MASSIVE discrepancy.
I’m sure to nobody’s surprise, support didn’t know the answer either 🥲.
All I know is this, directly quoted from support:
Guests are people who have not logged in/signed up yet but checked your profile page.
A user is a fan who is logged into their account at OnlyFans.
Each view counts as unique.
Which is…not helpful at all. Somebody please tell me why a company making over a billion dollars per year cannot answer such a simple data question 😭
I have no idea why the tracking link data is so drastically different from the statistics page data for the exact same time period.
But, here’s why I’ve committed to using tracking links only:
Knowing how each individual social media platform is performing helps me make data-driven decisions on how to optimize different platforms. Reddit, for example, converts exceptionally well so it’s a good use of time to figure out how to drive more OF clicks from Reddit.
Knowing which social media platforms perform terribly can help me decide whether or not I should try to figure out how to increase the conversion rate, optimize it so that it at least takes up much less of my time, or stop pursuing that channel altogether.
I know none of us can say for sure which data source is correct. I don’t work at OF. I don’t know how they’re collecting data. I’m not an engineer. But! I believe that getting tracking data from those links correctly is simpler and more likely than the tracking needed to have accurate results in the user/visit/guests page. It’s just a guess, but it’s the data I’ve been looking at ever since.
A little homework for you: If you use tracking links, try it for yourself! Add up all your tracking link data and compare it with your statistics page data for the same time frame: is it similar or is it drastically different? Let me know!
Good luck out there data girlies 💕