MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

During our August 26 web clinic on optimizing affiliate marketing, several participants wanted to know more about setting up and measuring their programs. We’ve distilled those questions for the latest edition of our Ask an Optimizer column.

Q: What kinds of businesses are suited to using affiliates?

I think businesses that are devoted to ecommerce or lead collection are going to be exposed to the greatest number of affiliates — especially those that are somewhat familiar for your marketplace.

Q: How do you identify & recruit the best affiliates?

Form a good relationship with affiliate networks/managers. Also, watch forums for affiliates that seem like they are worth approaching. A word of caution: some of the “top contributors” to these forums are not always the most successful. Approach with caution some of the “loud mouths” out there.

Having competitive payouts and reasonable offer terms are a must, and will also be attractive for recruitment.

Q: Are there any options for regionalizing affiliate marketing?

Yes, but traffic is going to be much smaller. Also, some of the bigger affiliates are not going to fool with these restrictions. I would team up with other companies in the same space, and just sell the leads that are not pertinent to your area of service.

Q: Which affiliate marketing tool is most effective? Banner ads, text ads, email campaigns, or mini web sites?

It depends on the offer and the audience the affiliate is trying to reach.  If you are promoting a good offer, you should develop most of these elements. Don’t handcuff the effectiveness of your affiliates and your business with a lack of materials. Make sure that you are tracking the effectiveness for each of these communication methods, as you might find some interesting data.

Q: How do I find niches I can be confident will yield sales? Or how do I test rapidly?

Testing rapidly is a good way to jump to conclusions, and fail. Obviously if the disparity is huge that is one thing, but do not rush to conclusions because we have all seen how internet traffic changes.  Do not ditch your confidence levels and testing best practices.

Q: How do I mix the “best techniques” for landing pages with “Google rules” for quality score?

Part of Google’s rules with quality score are items that you should have anyway. For example, a big part of quality score is how relevant the page is to the target keyword/phrase etc. I often see people suffer by trying to communicate too much within the images on a page. Make sure that good and relevant information isn’t contained in unreadable (to Google) images.

We also talk about having continuity between your ads and landing page. So make sure you have headlines that match keyword/phrases and will reassure the user they are in the right place, plus score relevance points with Google.

Q: What’s the simplest way to track keywords that are converting or predict them?

Talking to your offer company and discussing tracking options can open up true conversion tracking for you.

For prediction, if you are already running traffic, look at your CTR rates and try to estimate with this new traffic (keywords) — is it more relevant or general?  With that, try to look at what you are going to spend with this new traffic, and the conversion rates you are already observing.

Then factor the quality/relevance of the new traffic, and ask yourself: will the spend this traffic requires still allow me to be positive? Prediction really just comes with time and seeing what works. There is no guaranteed formula.

For more info, check out last week’s list of additional research and resources on affiliate marketing.

Have additional questions? Other things you’d like to Ask an Optimizer? Use the comments section below or tweet me at: @ctrentmarketing

Our new Ask an Optimizer column addresses questions we’ve received through our website and from members of the MarketingExperiments Optimization LinkedIn Group. The following question was submitted by Nikolay M.

Q: Does anybody have experience with load speed impact on conversion or bounce rates?

This is a very good question Nikolay, one that many people don’t think about. Because this area is something we address with our tests and treatment versions as a best practice, I don’t think we have case studies specific to this issue. However, I can offer insights on factors to consider and resources to use.

The first thing you should do is assess two items:

1. Traffic sources
2. Technology resources for your audience

Know your top traffic sources

More important than a list of tips or statistics is understanding how the majority of your visitors arrive at your website.

If you aren’t keeping an eye on this, it’s possible to spin your wheels trying everything when stepping back and understanding your audience could save you serious headaches.

Where users are coming from and how they arrive at your site or funnel pages will often dictate how long they will put up with the nuances of your site. For example, visitors arriving from searches (PPC and organic) are likely to be among the least patient site users. Think about it: they have just seen a sizable list of alternatives, so if your pages are confusing, overwhelming, or take too long to load, those visitors are out of there. I typically find these users (especially from Google) to be back-button happy.

Know the technology that the bulk of your audience is using

Through analytic tools you can get a good idea of what technology resources users have at their disposal. For instance, with Google Analytics you can see connection speed, operating system used, and a whole host of other items.

Use these insights to see how much wiggle room you have with how heavy your pages and website can be with content elements. If a large portion of your users are on dial-up or even DSL, or older operating systems, then you might want to increase efforts on CSS-based quick loading pages.

Now, some people will be stuck with a heavy website due to factors outside their control. If that’s the case, look to edit the order in which your website loads. Have some of the lighter elements load first, so there are at least some items on the page while the heavier elements are being compiled. This gives users a glimmer of hope that the greatest part is on its way. However, make sure the initial loading items aren’t information collection or other friction points, because users can be scared away before the incentives or explanations load.

Another element to try in this situation is an animated loading bar. This again shows the user that the site isn’t broken, just taking a while to load. I think people are a little too quick to dismiss this method, but feel that users have a greater propensity to stay if they know items are happening in the background.

Best practices and resources

As a general rule, we like to keep page load times under 8-9 seconds for 56k users. Shorter than that is even better if you can do so without sacrificing site quality or functionality. This covers a wide audience, and seems to fit the typical short attention span that internet users have.

For more on this area, I’d recommend WebsiteOptimization.com, which has several helpful resources, including an excellent Web Page Analyzer Tool that will scan a page, let you know load times, and give you tips to how to improve your page load times.