Affiliate Marketing Specialist

Using Testing & Tracking To Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Results

One of the cornerstones of direct marketing is the use of testing and tracking, which go hand in hand. Famed marketer Dan Kennedy likes to say that marketing comes down to psychology and math. Well, testing and tracking are where the math comes from.

Let’s start with testing. Everything you do online can be improved. You do this by selecting one thing, changing it and testing whether the response you want has improved. Let’s use a headline as an example. Your original headline is known as the control. You first must know what response you are getting with the control, which is where tracking comes into the picture, but we’ll get to that.

You then create a second headline and test it against the control, to see which is the winner, meaning it gives you the better response. A better response can mean anything from more opt-in’s to your newsletter, more click-thru's on an affiliate link or whatever you want it to be.

If the new headline performs better, it becomes the new control. If the original headline wins, it remains as the control. Ideally, you then begin the process all over again, always trying to beat the control and thus continually improving the response you are getting for the same effort.

There are almost limitless things you can test, but many of them, such as price and guarantees, don’t apply to affiliate marketers. Thus, your job is easier, since you can focus on the few things you do control, which will normally revolve around your content and preselling. One of the most important things to test will be the headlines you are using in all of your marketing. And if you are not now using headlines, start. This is well known to be one of the areas where even the most minor change can bring about a tremendous boost in the response you are getting.

Tracking the results of your marketing efforts is an integral part of this whole process. Without tracking, you wouldn’t even be able to know the results of your testing. Tracking simply means keeping track of what is occurring in your marketing. Things like click-thru rate, conversion rate, ad cost and most importantly, whether or not you actually made money off that particular ad or campaign.

As an affiliate, it can sometimes be difficult to track everything you want to, as you normally don’t have access to all the information from the sales process. A way around this is to promote smart affiliate programs that provide you with the ability to set up tracking campaigns within your affiliate account, but unfortunately, many merchants still do not provide this.

You can also use software solutions such as Clickalyzer, which is the only product I know of that will allow you to track your visitor from your website, through the affiliate link and all the way through to the sale on the merchant’s site. This is a fabulous tool for all serious affiliate marketers.

So, there you have it. Using testing and tracking for your affiliate marketing campaigns will boost your response and help you determine which of your promotions are worth it and which ones are costing you money.

 

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