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When I read about split testing, most of the time I see that the best way to conclusively determine whether a page performs better than another is to measure conversions. The only problem though is that to get an accurate number, you need at least 100 conversions on a page. I don’t know about you, but since I’m selling products, it would take me forever to get a decent sampling size.
Even if you were marketing CPA offers, that’s still a LOT of traffic you would need to drive to get 100 conversions on a page, and if you are trying to start a new campaign, you could be losing a lot of money waiting for those “definitive” results.
I have found out a few different metrics you can use to speed up testing, and give you early projections on a landing page’s potential. The reason I like this is that while these methods aren’t perfect, they will still help make better landing pages until you have a successful campaign running where you can afford to wait for 100 conversions.
Click-Throughs
If you are an affiliate marketer, then this can actually be a very good way to split test regardless. Your merchant’s sales pages are out of your control, so it may actually be a good idea NOT to incorporate them into your own testing.
Let me give you an example, say you send 100 people to 2 variations of a landing page, each promoting the same product. Landing page A has a 10% CTR, and landing page B has a 5% CTR. It’s obvious that landing page A is better, so you start a new split test.
Once you have created a great landing page, for example’s sake, one that converts at 25% CTR, THEN you can start measuring conversions as a metric, and see what merchant has the best converting product.
Now, say you drive 100 visitors a day to your landing page. If you hadn’t started by split testing with CTR, and were using the 5% CTR landing page, it would take you 5 times longer to get to 100 conversions than with the 25% CTR landing page.
Time On Page
This is an interesting concept; by measuring the time a visitor spends on a page, you can roughly gauge their level of interest. This method wouldn’t work as well for squeeze pages or CPA offers, but if you have a longer page, even a sales page, then this could really help.
The only problem is that you need to look at this on an individual visitor basis, something I haven’t found a free solution yet, since averages can have skewed results (one person visiting for an hour ruins everything).
I originally got this idea from a product called Conversion Prophet (which I haven’t tried yet). They use a three level system that ranks a visitor’s interest level. They call the levels attraction, interest, and desire.
It’s quite funny, because this is taken from a well known acronym called AIDA, or Attention Interest Desire Action, which relates to the selling process. As you can see, Action (or, a conversion), is last on the process, so these preliminary indicators could foresee a landing page’s potential.
Heatmaps
If you have a highly graphical landing page, maybe this will help. Are people clicking where they should? Are they clicking non-linked images? Could you move your main button to a better area?
I haven’t experimented much with mainly graphics landing pages, which are surely more relevant in CPA marketing, but I do know that Crazy Egg is a great tool for heat maps, and you can try it free.
So these are just a few ideas to get creative about split testing, just remember that even though these methods are supposed to speed up testing, you still have to be patient to get the most accurate results.
Leave a comment with your favorite ways of testing and optimizing your landing pages!
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The service provided by Crazy Egg is very good to optimize your banners, I really like it.
Thanks of an interesting post, I defiantely agree that time on page is an important factor but when we investigated it further we found it gets grossly polluted.#
We used the robot replay tracking software (its pretty good, tracks movement on the page) and found they very often when you have some huge page times its because people are doing two things at once like watching a video or working on something while you page is up.
Worth remembering before jumping too much on the stat (as you mentioned). A way to combat this is to take the average either as a median not a mean or remove the abnormal values before taking the mean of the data.
Hey Marv, interesting tracking software, I’ll definitely have to check that out.
Thanks for sharing your insight! Looks like time on page is an even more tricky metric to analyze than I thought
I’ve used Crazy Egg for some time but the results are not the best you can get. Commercial software is far better and more accurate.
I love heatmaps. Just wish they weren’t so expensive.
The only tool I have is, Google Analytics, It almost give all the information which we need. Only thing which i didn’t know is, how to convert that into measurable goals.
The folks at stomprnet.net are very good educators of innovative web elements and conversion testing. Go check them out.
Thanks for sharing that tool “crazy eggs”, it is pretty new thing for me and am wondering where it was hidden. I have seen many trackers and tools which can track several sites from one place but I hope that “crazy egg” would be very best utility.
Theses are great way to know your site’s stats..it will be a great help to site owners on how they will implement their marketing strategies.
Hi Tim,
I’m very new to affiliate marketing. I’m running my first campaign which I’m split testing a clickbank product.
My question is about impressions. How do you determine if the amount of impressions and the ratio it takes to receive a click?
Also what about the time it takes to receive a click? I one click per day good?
Thanks,
The Blog Novice
If you’re using PPC, then I would advise you to get a good conversion tracking system like Tracking202 (or self-hosted Prosper202). This will give you some great stats, including landing page clickthroughs.
If you are doing this for just a regular site, then you could track this with Google Analytics. Just check the amount of page views a content page gets, and then how many clicks (hops) go through to CB. To get more specific data, track outbound clicks with GA or use tracking id’s (TID) with CB.
I agree with Tim…PPC can get expensive, so it’s better to get something that is going to optimize on it’s own.
Would you consider bounce rate as a metric? I have the same problem with testing: I just can’t send enough traffic to have a good data sample because would be too expensive!