Split Test Affiliate Programs With OpenX
I am sure by now you have heard the “drill baby, drill” chant that was used by Sarah Palin and John McCain during the general election. We affiliates have a slogan too! It’s “test baby, test!” That’s right. Testing is the best way to dig out the unhidden money out of your affiliate business. Now, I am sure most people have heard about the concept of A/B testing. PPC marketing professionals test their ads against each other long enough to find the best ad. Surprisingly, a lot of new affiliates do not do enough A/B testing on their affiliate offers, which means there is a good chance they are leaving money on the table.
When I started in the affiliate marketing field, I was flying blind. I didn’t do much testing. My goal was to make as much money as possible, and I was very optimistic about my chances. Obviously, thinking that you will convert is much different than actually converting. That’s why you should test different offers from different merchants in your niche to find out which merchant offer converts the best.
Depending on your site structure, you may have to use different tools to properly test among multiple affiliate offers. My sites are about 100% based on the Wordpress platform. I use Open X to test offers from various merchants on CJ and LinkShare. I run banners and text links in different locations and rotate my offers 50-50 to find out which one converts the best. In Adwords, you can find the winner ad after about 100 clicks, but I go with 200 clicks with my affiliate links.
You can do A/B testing with a simple PHP script, but OpenX is a highly sophisticated ad management system that can generate comprehensive analysis on your campaigns. Every week or so, I go through the information from OpenX reports to figure out which affiliate program is the winner. By keep testing between different offers, you can not only increase your conversion rate, but also focus your efforts on programs that provide you with the biggest bang for the buck.
Affiliate landing pages and offers change all the time, so you shouldn’t cross out an affiliate offer forever if it ends up in the loser column. You should be alert about the changes in affiliate programs in your niche and re-load offers that have been improved. So as you see things don’t stand still in the affiliate marketing world. You keep testing as long as you humanly can.
Once I have found the winning affiliate program, I use WP Affiliate to change all my text links to point to the winner affiliate offer. WP Affiliate is a premium wordpress plug-in that allows you to automatically make link out of words on your Wordpress site. For instance, with WP Affiliate you can define the phrase “offer x” to go to http://www.offerx.com throughout your blog. Now if it turns out that offery.com converts better, you can change all the links on your Wordpress site to point to the new page with a single click [Caution: you may want to use less specific anchor text for these links in order to avoid sending people to an unexpected landing page (e.g use Garmin 680 as your anchor text instead of Amazon Garmin 680). ].
You can see by now how powerful the combination of OpenX and WP Affiliate can be for your affiliate business. OpenX allows you to methodically test among different affiliate offers in your niche. WP Affiliate allows you to swap out the old links and insert the new links, fast! You can choose other tools if you prefer, but you should always test among different offers to put more cash in your pockets. Remember our slogan? Test baby, test!