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In my last post, which was sadly about a week ago, I gave an example of a particular affiliate offer that may or may not convert well with pay-per-click marketing. Really though, most markets have the potential to be profitable if you just figure out the secret combination. Contrary to what many might think, the way to find this secret is not through a bunch of expensive ebooks or membership sites. Instead, you must test for yourself in order to determine what does work and what doesn’t work.

Rather than talk about the theories and concepts of testing different campaign elements, this post is going to talk about what I do when I really want to ensure success in a new market. It requires a lot of additional effort, and there is no way to guarantee that it will make a profit, but by finding out exactly what works and what doesn’t work, it’s pretty hard not to.

Build Multiple Landing Pages

The first thing I would do, before even creating the pay-per-click campaign, is build multiple landing pages. If you’ve never seen the test results before, you would be surprised at what a difference design, color, and layout can make. Some markets might respond well to professional-looking landing pages while other may prefer amateur designs.

I would probably start off with two or three different design variations which would be wrapped around the same content. You don’t have to create separate pages if you know how to put together a simple template system. All you would need to do is create the new theme files and your pages would automatically inherit their design.

The variations in design I would use would include overall look and feel (amateur vs. professional), color, and content layout. Anything can make a difference, so try to make use of creative combinations. The only thing you need to be careful of is making too many landing pages because it would be an incredible amount of work and would be difficult to test.

Once you spit test your initial designs, you can introduce more completely new designs, or you can simply start changing things around on your winning design.

Swap Landing Page Copy

After you have concluded which of your landing page designs is the best, it’s time to start changing the words. Try adding a magazine-style headline, or if you already have one, try completely rewriting it. See how the use of textual call-to-actions vs. graphical call-to-actions effects your conversions. Rewrite your paragraph transitions to guide the reader down the correct path.

Many promotions could benefit from the use of pictures. See if you get more conversions with pictures or without pictures. Also try using stock promotional photos vs. homemade photos.

Most affiliate promotions that I do aren’t overly heavy with sales copy, so there isn’t as much to change around as if you were testing a long-form sales letter. Just keep in mind that they way you word things, and the emotions that you illicit, can be a big factor in the visitors decision to take the desired action.

Track Keywords By Group Or Individually

How precise you want to get from the start is up to you, but you are going to eventually want to track your keywords individually. I used to start out with ad group tracking, but lately have been using keyword-level tracking right from the start in an effort to speed up the entire process.

Once you have a system in place, it’s very easy to implement it on any new campaign that you are building. My favorite way to track keywords is to send the tracking data through the destination URL and then append it to a custom tracking id. I then get the conversion reports and process them with a custom script that gathers the information I need. I do this so that I don’t have to rely on affiliate managers placing my “conversion code” on their landing pages. This method takes some extra work, but is much more reliable.

Know When Visitors Came To The Page

In addition to tracking which keywords are producing conversions, I would also track the time of day that they landed on your page. This will allow you to increase your position during high conversion times and decrease your costs during low conversion times. Depending on your market, the time of day can be a big factor in determining how impulsive they are or how prepared they are to make a buying decision.

Write Multiple Text Ads

Anyone who knows anything about pay-per-click marketing will tell you to write multiple text ads so that you can get the highest click through rates and improve your positioning, but that’s not what it’s all about. Your text ads also play an important role in your conversion rates.

As an extreme example, if you write a text ad that appeals to many people and says “Get Free Movies Here”, you will probably get a pretty high click through rate. However, if they come to your page and see that they have to use their credit card, they probably won’t result in a conversion.

Make sure you know which text ads produced sales so that you can figure out which ones are matched correctly with your offer and are putting your visitors in the right state of mind. It makes no sense to have a high click through rate and a low cost per click if none of those clicks are generating a return on your investment.

Putting It All Together

None of this is necessary to make a profit in affiliate marketing, but I guarantee that it will increase both your chances of success and your potential profits exponentially. When I first started out, I didn’t do any of this, and I got pretty lucky. However, the pay-per-click game is a lot tougher now, and it makes sense to do all you can to optimize your efforts.

While all of this might seem extremely daunting, implementing it is relatively simple. The hard part is collecting statistically relevant data, interpreting it properly, and making the right decisions. If you can succeed at that, you will have a very good chance of profiting in any niche you choose.