Dear Friend,
As I mentioned in a previous post, the Split Test Accelerator comes off the market after April 8th (tomorrow relative to time of writing), and will remain off the market until May 5th.
By the way, thank you for all the great comments. I’m taking all the wishes, advice, and so forth to heart. Seriously. I will revisit all the comments from time to time as I evaluate how the new arrangement is going.
For now, I’m testing the new arrangement, and I look forward to getting a lot of good work done during the break 
Now, I want to tell you about something new.
STA has a great new feature
that will help you make more affiliate sales.
If you sell affiliate products (as an affiliate) through networks like Clickbank or Commission Junction, you can now use STA to run Taguchi tests on your affiliate pre-sell pages, and track conversions with the TID tracking codes they allow you to insert in your affiliate link.
That means you can try to double your sales through testing, even though you don’t control the thankyou page. STA can rotate all your testing ideas for you, and keep track of which customers saw which elements on the page.
Clickbank calls it a ‘TID’, Commission Junction calls it an ‘SID’. Other networks might call it something else. You’ll know it by how it works.
When you insert a TID into your affiliate link, it looks something like this:
<a href=’http://affiliate-link?tid=444′>visit merchant now!</a>
To use this feature with STA, you just use the STA visitor id number for your TID.
And the visitor id number can be automatically inserted into your link on your landing page.
You just make your link look like this:
<a href=’http://affiliate-link?tid=<?php echo $visid;?>‘>visit merchant now!</a>
Then, you collect the TIDs from your sales report from the affiliate network (like Clickbank or CJ), and you feed them back into a special page, and all the multi-variate conversion data will show up in your reports, just like any other test you run with STA. Here’s what the new TID entry page looks like:
Let me explain the numbered features.
#1: This is where you enter the TIDs. If the affiliate sale is your primary outcome, and you’re not tracking ROI (this is the most typical case), you can enter them one per line. It’s as simple as it could be.
If an affiliate sale is not the primary outcome, or if you want to optimize for ROI instead of straight conversions, there are other simple formats for the data in those cases as well. (Note: I don’t usually advise optimizing for ROI in most cases, because the variances are huge compared to the straight conversion case, and it takes a lot longer to get actionable information).
#2: This shows you what your affiliate link should look like.
#3: This part explains how to format your data in the three main cases.
That’s it. All you have to do is get the list of sales from your affiliate network sales report. Extract the TIDs from each sale, and feed them back into STA. And then you will get the conversion data you need for your Taguchi test on your affiliate presales page.
STA has kept track of which factors were on the page for each of these visitors, and it will give credit to the right options every time.
It’s pretty neat.
Now, it might get even better, depending on how you drive traffic to your page . . .
Do You Use Adwords?
If you use adwords to drive traffic to your affiliate presell pages, things are really good with STA:
- STA tracks the actual long tail keyword the visitor used to find your page.
- It keeps track of which content network sites drive traffic, and what the conversion rates are for each, so you can decide which content network sites to exclude.
- It allows you to use an adgroup or ad-level tracking code, so you can track the conversion rates of your ads and adgroups
- You can even see how all the factors on your landing page perform for each ad, adgroup or keyword.
It’s kind of funny, . . .
The Split Test Accelerator
is revealing itself to be
an affiliate marketer’s dream.
I’ve seen several tools pop up recently that just do some of these things. And none of them let you run Taguchi tests on your landing page.
STA has done most of these things all along. I just didn’t know to mention them until these other tools came out.
And, of course, STA is a great tracking and Taguchi-testing tool as well.
Anyway, I hope to have a video about this made up for next month’s sales cycle. But I wanted you to know that the new TID feature was live and running already, in case you wanted to get started.
Remember, Tuesday, April 8th (tomorrow) is the last day STA will be available this month (until May 5th).
Here’s the link to the sales page:
http://www.splittestaccelerator.com
Good Success!
Jim
P.S. feel free to coment on the new affiliate product tracking features. I’m sure I haven’t covered all the bases here.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Wow that’s pretty cool Jim. This closes the gap between high end testing tools and discovering optimal landing pages for affiliate marketing.
Good job.
Now get back to work
April 7th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Hi Jim,
The software looks “difficult to use” from the screen shots. I have tried other Taguchi testing software, and it also was hard to use. You needed to be a “rocket scientist” to make it work and to figure out what was happening with all the gibberish that it reported. Took more time to get it to work than to just run the ads and let be what is!
If you can simplify it, I would be interested.
John B.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Thanks for the comment Peter.
John, STA does report a lot of things, but the basics are pretty simple. You basically just try a bunch of stuff on your landing page, and see what works and what doesn’t.
I would never try to talk someone into purchasing STA if it looks too complicated, but I’m always working to find ways to explain it so it doesn’t seem too overwhelming.
Feel free to just sit back for a while and keep learning until you feel comfortable.
Jim
April 7th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Listen to what you say is good, the reality is this?