10.AB Testing Website

You have followed the 10 steps to create a Successful Affiliate Marketing site and now it’s time to start A/B Testing your new money making WordPress website. But what is A/B Testing?

A/B or ‘Split Testing’ in the simplest of terms is the comparison of two versions of the same page. By comparing the performance of these two versions of the same page you can start to understand which version converts best.

Why Should I A/B Test?

If you consider that all websites on the internet have a purpose, a reason for being, whether it’s to push visitors to a sales funnel, or just persuade them to click on an Adsense promo, every page has a strategic purpose and if that purpose is not being realized then the page has no reason to exist.

If visitors are not going to your sales page or clicking on your Adsense links, then your ‘Goals’ are not being met.

In short, you’re not converting.
So, if you are asking ‘Why Should I AB Test’ then the simple answer is, to make sure your hard work and long hours of creating content are functioning as you hoped. Without knowing if your pages are fulfilling their primary function you are publishing content that may take time and effort to produce and never bearing fruit.

With AB testing you’re attempting to get the most out of your existing traffic without increased your acquisition costs, basically, you’re trying to get more Return On Investment (ROI) whether that is time or money, or probably both.

What Can Be A/B Tested?

Anything that is editable that can influence the reader.
* Page name
* Headline
* Subheaders
* Paragraphs
* Call To Action CTAs
* Images
* Content at the folder

A/B Testing Process

Follow this points and you will start to see patterns and learn to understand and react to the data you are collecting.

* Why is your bounce rate so high?

* Research: Use Google Analytics to understand your visitor behavior

* Design a simple test: Change an Element on a page with high bounce rate.

* Estimate number of visitors/days you need to run the test using AB Test Duration Calc

*Test your amended design:

* Analyze Result: Compare resulting bounce rate on the new page with the new Element against the old page. Do you see an improvement? If there is an improvement you can conclude the Element you changed was a factor in the high bounce rate.

What Tools Can I Use?

There are numerous tools, paid and free, but as you are here on section 10 of creating a successful affiliate marketing website I know you’ve built your site in WordPress and installed Google Analytics, so I’m not waste any time looking at other tools. Instead, I’ll show you how to Split Test using WordPress and Google Content Experiments.

What I am going to do is give you a visual walkthrough of setting up your Content Experiments by creating a copy of my home page and changing the page name. I don’t expect any usable data from this experiment, but it will show you exactly how to set up your test pages.

A: Login to Google Analytics and under the appropriate domain go to the search bar and add ‘experiments’ and select to resulting Experiments.

B: You can see there are no experiments set up. Select ‘Create Experiment’.

C: Your empty experiment is ready to complete. NEXT

D: Name your new experiment and select your objective, for this experiment I want to know about the bounce rate, so I select Bounces. NEXT.

E: I want the Percentage of traffic to be 100% with no email notification and the traffic to be distributed evenly between the two pages. NEXT STEP

F: Now add both the Original and the experimental URL. NEXT STEP

G: Select ‘Manually insert the code’ then highlight the code to copy.

H: Add this code to you head.php of your website theme. Paste it below the opening tab and save.

I: When you copy the code to be install you will see above the code a link to ‘Google Analytics tracking code installed‘ as shown below
Adding script code to your page

1.Make sure your original and variant pages have Google Analytics tracking code installed.

2.Then, paste this experiment code immediately after the opening head tag at the top of your original page.
Open this link and copy the code which you will add to the test pages, both the original and the new test page as illustrated below

J: Now add the Google tracking code to both the test pages. Enter ‘Text’ mode, select the ‘code’ button then paste it in the tracking code. Then select the ‘code’ button again to close the tab. SAVE

K: Return to the Google Experiments and select ‘Start Experiment’

L: Confirmation of your Experiment is displayed.

M: You now have you first A/B Split test set up. Over the next few days, data will start to arrive.

Now you have all the hard work done you need to know about a couple of rules you should work by

Redirects:

Redirects can be used to direct traffic to your testing page using a 301(permanent) or 302(temporary).
This is quite important. For your testing purposes always use the 302 (Temporary). This tells the bots it is a temporary redirect and the not to drop the original URL from their index.

Testing Time:

You will be aiming to complete your testing as efficiently as possible, the less time spent running test pages the better. Good AB testing tool will tell you when enough data has been collect to allow for an analysis.

Word Of Warning:

If you are thinking of out-smarting Google then best think again, they are always a few steps ahead. Some webmasters may be thinking their split testing can incorporate a set of pages served to the reader and a set served to the Google Bots.

It’s out of scope for this article but for technical reasons this may seem like a good idea but it’s not going to end well.

Final Note:

Never Give UP!!!!!

keep working and never give up….follow your dream of being financially and location independent.

Don’t forget, you should have read the whole series of my ’10 steps of creating a successful affiliate marketing website’ to fully appreciate the details.

1.Build your free site
2.Hosting
3.Niche Market
4.Keywords
5.Google analytics
6.Mailing lists
7.Writing content
8.Affiliate links
9.Traffic generation
10.Testing!

I hope my series of 10 posts has helped you in your quest towards becoming independent and self-sufficient financially.

Do you have any questions or do you think I have missed something important? Please contact me with your comments, thoughts.