Posts Tagged ‘tracking’

Written by: Guest Author, Danny Iny

Are you an affiliate marketer? Do you want to make more money?

Yes and yes, right?

You’ve probably tried every trick in the book, right?

Google image ads, Twitter traffic, cheap Facebook ads… every possible way of getting cheap clicks to your landing page has probably caught your eye at some point or another.

Most of these tricks don’t really work, and if they do, it isn’t for long.

The real secret to making big money as an affiliate is split-testing.

And as an affiliate marketer, it’s actually easier for you than it is for a lot of other people…

Affiliate Marketers Have So Much Less to Worry About!

Affiliate marketers are already several steps ahead of the online marketing curve.

That’s because, as an affiliate marketer, you aren’t responsible for the entire chain of conversion.
All you have to do is find qualified leads, warm them up, and send them to the vendor’s landing page – the vendor will do the rest.

Not that all of that stuff is easy… that’s why some people are super-affiliates, and some people don’t make a dime.
But still, it’s the vendor who has to create an awesome product, and to tweak their landing page and funnel until it is a high-performing conversion machine. Which means that you don’t have to worry about turning prospects into customers, or keeping them as repeat customers – that’s the vendor’s job.

Which is why things are easier for affiliate marketers – they don’t have to split-test their product ideas, and they don’t have to optimize the back-end of the funnel.

But despite all that, in some ways, split testing is actually harder for affiliate marketers than it is for other people…

Affiliate Marketers Have Much Less Control

Split testing is harder for affiliate marketers because there’s less that you can split test; here’s a short list of the things that you don’t control:
• The product
• The checkout process
• The back-end funnel
• The messaging
• The imagery
• And the list goes on…

So in other words, if the offer isn’t fundamentally capable of selling itself, there isn’t all that much you can do about it.

Which is why affiliates look for tried and tested offers, with solid and proven EPC (earnings per click) rates. The trouble is that every other affiliate marketer is doing the exact same thing!

And if every other affiliate marketer is doing the exact same thing…

There’s Dramatically More Competition!

Yup, competition is a lot tougher for affiliate marketers.

Whereas people who sell their own stuff have to compete with other products and offers (which is hard enough!), affiliate marketers also have to compete with lots of other people who:
• Target the same lead sources,
• Run similar ads,
• Refer to the same swipe material, and
• Sell the exact same thing!

Yikes – what can you do to stand out?

That’s where split-testing comes in. In order to excel as an affiliate marketer, you need to constantly be split-testing the things that you do control, namely:
• Your lead sources
• Your ads
• Your landing pages
• Your incentives

Let’s go through these all one-by-one, and explore what to test, and how to do it. But first…

How do you do split testing, anyway?

Just to get us all on the same page, let’s quickly review.

Split testing (or A/B testing) is about testing two different variations of something, to see which does a better job of getting your audience to do what you want them to do. Common examples of things that you can split test include headline variations, button text and colors, and product pictures.

At a high level, that’s all there is to it.

Now, when it comes to running the actual tests, you need two things:
1. Some sort of technology to randomly serve the different variations to visitors.
2. Some way of analyzing the results to know when they’re statistically significant (in other words, to make sure that the results you’re seeing are caused by whatever you’re testing, rather than just being a random coincidence).

This may sound a bit complicated, but you really don’t need to worry about it; there are great tools that will do it all for you, like Google Website Optimizer (free), or Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer (paid, but are worth it).

And as for doing the analysis, there are lots of great free split test checkers out there that can do it for you.

Okay, are we up to speed?

Good – now let’s get into the meat of what you, as an affiliate marketer, can be testing…

Split Testing Your Lead Sources

The first thing that you can (and should) split test is your lead sources – in other words, where are you getting your traffic and prospects from.

Too many affiliates are one-trick ponies in this regard – they have their favorite traffic strategy (often the only one that they’ve been able to get decent results from), and they stick to it like glue.

Well, there are a lot of traffic sources out there, for example:
• Google AdWords
• MSN/Bing/Yahoo!
• Facebook
• Twitter lists
• CPV ad networks
• Email blasts to your list
• Email blasts to rented lists
• JVs with related products
• And the list goes on… and on… and on!

Different lead sources will work differently for different offers, so test them to see what works best. Also, when testing, make sure that you aren’t comparing absolute conversion numbers, but rather conversion relative to the cost of the traffic!

Split Testing Your Ads

The second thing that you should split test is the ad or call to action that you are presenting to your leads. Here are some things that you can test:
• The headline of the ad. Try featuring different pain points or benefits, to see what works best.
• The body of the ad. It may be short (like on AdWords) or longer, but either way, you’re communicating what you’re offering, and why it’s valuable. Change that up to see what makes a difference.
• The call to action. Experiment with more and less explicit calls to action (“click here” vs. “learn more”, for example), and experiment with a focus on action versus results (“buy now” vs. “get instant access”).
Just one thing – when you’re testing different ads, make sure you’re tracking the right thing, and that is sales (not click-throughs)!

It’s not hard to write an ad that will get lots of people to click, but what you want to do is write an ad that will get few people to click, many of whom will then buy. Consider adding barriers to interest (like a listed price) on the ad, to deter people who aren’t likely to make a purchase.

Split Testing Your Landing Pages

Yup, direct-linking to an affiliate offer is a sucker’s bet, because you’re giving up way too much control over the sales process.

Which is why your landing page is where most of your split testing is going to happen – and so it should be! Your landing page, realistically speaking, is what will make the most difference to your bottom line.

Here are some of the most important things that you should test on your landing page:
• Your headline. Yes, you’ve heard this before, but it’s true – the headline determines how many of the people visiting your page actually read the first paragraph, as opposed to clicking away. So test, and test, and test, until you get it right.
• Your page format. In other words, short vs. long copy, and text vs. video.
• Delayed button introduction. You’ve probably seen this – a button that only appears after a video has been running for a certain amount of time. Test it out – it might work for you.
• Your colors. Different colors prompt different behaviors (this is called color psychology), and you should test different combinations to see what works best for your offer and audience.
• Your button placements and text. This can make a huge difference on click-throughs and purchases, so test, test, and test!
• Your trust seals. These are the seals from Trust-E, Verisign, the Better Business Bureau, and other organizations, that let the reader know that they can trust you and the merchant that you are representing.
• Your affiliate disclaimer. This is one that many people overlook, but it can make a big difference. Sometimes you’ll get better results with the small print in the footer-style, but sometimes you’re better off working it into your text (“Hell yeah, I’m an affiliate – I’m proud to stand with this offer!”).

This can take a lot of time to do properly, but believe me, the results are worth it!

Split Testing Your Incentives

The last thing that you should be split testing is something that many affiliates overlook altogether, and that is your incentive offer.

An incentive is something that you offer so that people buy through your affiliate link, as opposed to going directly to the merchant, or going through somebody else’s link. This is particularly valuable during a launch, when your prospects are likely to be hearing about the offer from a lot of other people.

Here are some of the things that you could consider offering as an incentive to people who buy through your link:
• Free or discounted access to one of your products
• Some free consulting time with you
• Access to an exclusive webinar that you will put on
• A portion of your affiliate commission, thereby reducing the effective price of the offer
• There are many other ideas… use your imagination!

The importance of an incentive can’t be over-stated – especially in an affiliate-saturated market, it can make all the difference.

Now, after reading this post, you should be ready to go out and split test to your heart’s content. But before you do that, I have two warnings to leave you with…

Warning #1: Testing Shouldn’t Be Random…

Some people think of split testing as being akin to panning for gold – you grab a big chunk of dirt, and hope there’s something valuable in there.

So they test every random thing without any rhyme or reason, until they arrive at a combination better than what they’re already running.

This might work if you’ve got the traffic of a Google or Yahoo!, but I’m assuming that you don’t (and even if you did, it isn’t the smartest way to do things).

Your split testing should be planned and intentional; think about what is likely to have the most impact on your audience, and there for yield the best results.

If you’re not sure where to start, then use a framework to track your audience through the conversion process, to see where you need to start first – or ask someone you trust to weigh in and give you some advice.

Warning #2: Only Test ONE Thing at a Time!

After reading a post like this one, you might feel the urge to make a long list of things you want to test, and then create a new campaign implementing all of those tests.

Resist that urge!

The key to split testing is to isolate variables – in other words, you want to test one thing at a time, so that you know what is responsible for any changes that you observe.

Order your list by priority of what you think will make the most difference, and then test one thing at a time, until you are confident that the results are statistically significant (as described above – you can use free split test checkers to make sure that this has been accomplished).

So plan out your tests. Rank them by priority.

And start testing!

About the Author

Danny Iny is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the training program that turns non-marketers into expert marketers. Visit his site today to download a free split test checker, or follow him on Twitter @DannyIny.

Posted by: Che Horder, Business Intelligence Manager

This is part three of a five-part, five day series about how to best take advantage of the new analytics.

The new ClickBank Analytics feature has been available for a few weeks now, and we would like to follow up with ideas on how to explore and utilize some of new metrics that are now available to you. Part 1 of this series details what the different stages represent and how to measure the full process from Stage 1 to Stage 4. Part 2 outlines Order Form Sale Conversion. Today’s post deals with measuring Hops per Order Form.

Hops per Order Form Impression: Stage 1 to Stage 2

The Hops per Order Form Impression metric tells you how successful your prospects at the Hop stage are at converting to the Order Form Impression stage. If your Hops per Order Form Impression is 12, that means on average it takes 12 prospects at the Hop stage to have 1 prospect successfully reach the ClickBank Order Form. The lower the metric, the more efficiently you are converting prospects from the Hop stage to the Order Form Impression stage. You may use the trend chart feature to find time periods when your Hops per Order Form Impression is lowest, and then correlate that metric to specific marketing tactics that work well.

For a prospect to successfully make it to the Order Form Impression stage, the following must have occurred:

• A valid, properly formatted HopLink is clicked on
• A vendor pitch page is rendered on the web browser
• A customer decides to proceed with purchasing the product, following a link to the order form
• A valid, properly formatted link to the ClickBank Order Form is clicked on
• The ClickBank Order Form page is rendered on the web browser

This metric is available to create a trend chart or view in the data table. To create a chart utilizing the metric, locate the Data Type selection box and choose Hops. Then locate the View selection box and choose Hops Per Order Form Impression. The metric will be displayed on the trend chart for the timeframe you choose. The metric is also available to view in the data table located below the trend chart. The data table allows you to view the metric by a specific attribute of the sale and in total over a specified time period. For example, you can choose to view Hops per Order Form Impression for a specific country or product.

Check back tomorrow for information about order form impression count vs. order form submit count.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Earlier this week, we released several major improvements to our system that will help both vendors and affiliates grow and improve their businesses. In case you missed them, here’s a recap of what we released.

Help Center

You’ve probably already seen the new Help Center tab on the right-hand side of our navigation bar, but if not, be sure to check it out! The Help Center contains many new articles for both affiliates and vendors, covering everything from creating a ClickBank account to attracting more affiliates and learning about common ways to promote products. It’s a great place to look for any information you need about being more successful as a ClickBank client.

New & Improved Client Analytics

We’ve made major improvements to our Client Analytics, allowing you to see more detail than ever about your sales and promotions. Our improved Client Analytics lets you look at trends, order form impressions data, reporting by various dimensions like geographic location, and more.

To view the new Client Analytics, log in to your account and click the Reporting tab. Then click Analytics NEW! on the right side of the subnav:

To read more about all the features Client Analytics has to offer, and how to use it, see our Help Center article.

Integrated Sales Reporting

Clients can now track successful orders (conversions) by linking the ClickBank order process to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing, giving you more information about sales and the effectiveness of promotional efforts than ever before.

Read more about Integrated Sales Reporting in the Help Center.

ClickBank API

The ClickBank API makes it possible for a wide range of computer programs to securely access ClickBank account information on behalf of ClickBank account owners. Some of the functions available to users of the API include the ability to:

• Request a refund for a customer’s purchase
• Request a cancelation for a customer’s subscription
• Retrieve a list of transactions in a ClickBank account for a given timeframe

Read more about the ClickBank API in the Help Center.

Posted by: Jeff Leget, Director of IT Operations

Some ClickBank clients have raised concerns that the traffic and clicks that they see in external analytics applications such as Google and Yahoo Analytics sometimes don’t match their ClickBank Hop analytics or sales numbers.

Affiliate-driven sales account for the vast majority of ClickBank’s sales, and we are completely committed to making Hop tracking as accurate as possible. ClickBank will soon release new functionality that will allow you to integrate Google and Yahoo Analytics into the ClickBank Hop and sales cycle. This will give our clients complete visibility into the ways in which affiliate promotions translate to Hops, order form visits, and eventually completed sales.

Since the Vendor Thank You page is the last destination for a ClickBank consumer following a purchase, it would seem as though comparing the number of completed sales to the number of visits to the Thank You page would be relatively straightforward. However, I’ll share with you a number of different ways by which traffic can reach this page, demonstrating why this comparison can sometimes be inaccurate.

1.       ClickBank Sales: The most obvious and rewarding way in which traffic lands on a Vendor Thank You page is via a successful ClickBank sale. As mentioned on our Vendor Tools page, ClickBank will always pass nine query string parameters to the Thank You page. These parameters indicate that the visitor has placed an authentic ClickBank order.

2.       Robots: Search engines spider websites to improve search capabilities. The Thank You page should never be scanned by search engines. The Vendor should always add the META tag described in our Vendor Tools to prevent robots from adding the Thank You page to a search engine list.

3.       Customer Bookmarks: A ClickBank customer can always bookmark the Thank You page. Once bookmarked, they can visit the Thank You page as many times as they like.

4.       GOTO link in the receipt email: When a customer makes a purchase, ClickBank sends them a receipt email that includes a GOTO link to the Thank You page. This GOTO link is only valid for 14 days after the sale is made. It contains an encrypted identifier that ClickBank verifies and ties back to the original Thank You page URL given to the customer at the time of sale. A customer is allowed to visit the Thank You page via this GOTO link as many times as they want within that 14-day window.

5.       ClickBank Customer Service: In some cases, ClickBank can provide a customer with the original Thank You page URL and parameters. This is done in cases where sending the customer the Thank You page URL will keep them from requesting a refund, such as if they were unable to download the product immediately after purchase. This is typically only done within the 60-day refund period.

So how can you, the vendor, better protect your Thank You page and get more accurate traffic statistics? ClickBank provides multiple ways to protect the Thank You page in our Vendor Tools. Here are a few highlights:

1.       A Thank You page should always be a script-based page, such as PHP, ASP, Perl, etc. A scripted page can read and evaluate the parameters that ClickBank passes. The Thank You page can easily be scripted to only permit visitors that have valid ClickBank parameters, like the ClickBank receipt.

2.       A Thank You page should always be protected by the ClickBank Link Security Script and a Secret Key. ClickBank provides code examples on the Vendor Tools page that show how a scripted page can verify the ClickBank Proof of Purchase (CBPOP) value. The Thank You page can then be scripted to only permit visitors that have a valid CBPOP value. It is worth mentioning that less than 2% of registered ClickBank vendors use a Secret Key. However, for sales on any given day, over 50% of the sites that make a sale use a Secret Key. The lesson here is that the most successful ClickBank vendors protect their product using the ClickBank Secret Key and CBPOP.

3.       Check the time. ClickBank passes the time of the original sale in computer epoch time (seconds since 1970). A scripted Thank You page can easily verify that the order occurred within a given number of days. The Thank You page can then be scripted to only permit visitors within a specific number of days since the original sale. This prevents people from accessing the Thank You page URL via bookmarking or sharing.

4.       Script and log the visitor data. Once your scripted Thank You page has filtered out robots and unverified visitors, you can now accurately track unique visitors by logging the receipt number. Obviously, some consumers will download a product twice if they have problems, but a scripted Thank You page will allow you to match unique visitors with unique sales.

I hope this helps demystify the occasional inconsistencies between ClickBank sales numbers and Thank You page visits. The new ClickBank integration with third-party analytics programs should help even more. Look for it in the near future.

Posted by: Michael Poston, Product Manager

As a rule of thumb, you should gather competitive intelligence (CI) for your business. Doing so will allow you to better understand current and potential competitors, industry trends, and possible threats. As a result, you will be empowered to make more informed decisions about your product and strategic initiatives.

To do this effectively, you should implement a process designed to filter large volumes of data into clear and actionable insight. For instance, using a RSS parser such as Jawfish to receive, organize, and redistribute feed content can automate CI data mining and distribution. Simply take the repurposed RSS feed content and display it on an intranet or wiki page, and voila, you have a CI portal.

Similarly, you can use Web page monitoring tools to ensure you are “in the know” regarding your competitors’ activities. For example, you can use a tool like TrackEngine, InfoMinder, or WatchThatPage to notify you every time your competitors’ news or press release pages are updated. Review the content as you are notified, identify if it is significant, and redistribute within your company as necessary.

Lastly, use tools like Twitturly or Twitterfox to easily monitor popular links being tweeted for subjects related to your competitors, your industry, or possible threats to your business. Doing so will give you nearly real-time visibility into their activities and the community’s response to it. You can also use the tool Tweet Scan to get emailed updates on tweets for particular keywords. It delivers information less frequently than the other tools, but can be good for receiving summaries if you don’t have a lot of time to monitor the other tools.

In conclusion, the Internet has changed the meaning of “readily available information.” If you haven’t already, you need to leverage tools like these to help you capture this information and organize it in a fashion that makes sense for your business. Taking the time to do so will lead to greater success.

Happy selling, friends!

Please note that all applications mentioned in this post are not affiliated with ClickBank and should be used at your own risk.

Posted by: Shelly Spafford, Senior Customer Service Representative

Most affiliates understand the need to run effective promotions in order to make sales. However, many affiliates may not understand how the information they can gain through the use of Tracking IDs can help them promote products more successfully. In this post, I’ll explain what they are and how they can be a huge help to your business.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

Many of our product publishers and affiliates turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google Adwords, to help drive quality traffic to their sites. While there are many ways to improve the performance of PPC advertising, one of the most useful, but occasionally overlooked, methods is a technique called daypart bidding.

Daypart bidding, also known as Ad Scheduling in Google Adwords, is a tool that is offered by both Google and MSN’s AdCenter. It allows you to adjust your bids in a particular PPC advertising campaign, based both on the day of the week and the time of day. You can turn off campaigns completely, or boost your bid to double your normal bid or more. It’s quick and easy to use, and gives you a great deal of control over your advertising.

While this technique can be especially useful for businesses with specific operating hours, it can also be very advantageous for online-only businesses like ClickBank clients. Since ClickBank reports the time of day of every sale, it can be helpful to analyze what days and times deliver the most value for you, and then adjust your advertising bids accordingly. For some people, this may be during normal business hours, but depending on the product it could be late at night or on the weekend.

Once you’ve identified your “prime time,” you can adjust your bids to make sure your product or site is getting maximum exposure at that time. Likewise, if there’s a particular day or time that your site just can’t seem to convert, you can turn down your bids during those times to save your advertising budget for more effective periods.

One great thing about daypart bidding is that you can make use of it even if you don’t have any kind of Web site analytics installed. All you need are the PPC advertiser’s traffic reporting and ClickBank’s sales reporting to start improving your advertising efforts and getting the most return on your investment. To achieve the biggest improvements, though, you should combine ClickBank’s reporting with Web site analytics and testing to get a complete picture of your site’s traffic and sales.

If you haven’t already tried daypart bidding, give it a shot and see how much more you can get out of your budget!

Posted by: Greg Lems, Director of Application Development

Here’s a riddle: What travels at the speed of light, takes up virtually no space, and changes constantly, yet is vitally important to ClickBank publishers and affiliates? Data!

The key to being effective as a ClickBank affiliate or publisher is having the knowledge of how one’s efforts to attract and convert customers are faring. Data is the key to this knowledge. In recent months, ClickBank has built functionality to help our clients receive data that is vital to their success as publishers and affiliates.

Starting last year, ClickBank made the “tracking ID” (or TID) functionality available to affiliates. This allows affiliates to pass parameters via their Hoplinks that show up at order time, enabling them to track anything they are interested in. Keywords, campaign names, anything that affiliates adjust to try to improve performance can be recorded in the TID and analyzed after orders have been placed.

ClickBank Analytics (available on the “Reporting” tab of your account) takes TIDs and many other factors into account to provide important data to affiliates. It shows how many Hoplinks have been attributed to an affiliate’s account, and also how many sales have occurred. Affiliates can view this data by publisher, to see which of the publishers they promote have the highest conversion rates. They can also view this data by hour or TID. All data is also downloadable by CSV (comma-separated values) for use in analysis tools or charting packages, such as MS Excel.

Additionally, ClickBank Analytics is useful to publishers as well. They can see how well their pitch pages convert, even breaking performance out by affiliate or hour of day.

Another new data-related feature we recently introduced is instant payment notification (IPN). If you choose to enable it, ClickBank will notify your server on a near real-time basis of every transaction event you were involved in, either as a publisher or affiliate. Programmers can write code to receive ClickBank IPNs and create a whole host of functionality, such as a running total of sales for the day or other dashboard features.

In upcoming releases we plan to build upon the data-related functionality we offer. One feature that has been frequently requested is charting or other graphical functionality on the analytics page. We look forward to hearing more from our community about your data-related needs.

As Director of Application Development for ClickBank, I’m keenly aware that there’s a world of programming opportunities available to our clients who want to analyze their ClickBank data. My job is to make sure people can access it and make good use of it. In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss tips and tricks that programmers can use to interface more closely with ClickBank systems.