Reverse Split Testing

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Guest Blogger: Thomas Deeter

I wish I had thought of this because it is truly simple and fantastic! The credit, however, goes to [tag-tec]Glenn Livingston[/tag-tec].

If you are not on his list, you missed a brilliant insight.

This one powerful (and free) research method could “viagrafy” your conversions and justify a top spot on AdWords, which, of course, leads to lots o’ sales.

Reverse Engineering for Affiliate Marketers

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what the #1 affiliate marketer in your niche did to his/her web site (tweaks to the copy, changes in the offer, adjustments to the images, etc.) that put them at the top of the PPC campaign that’s either sinking you to page 3 of the SERPs or yanking $2 a click from your tight marketing budget?

Step 1

You’ve probably performed this first step many times…

Go to Google search, type in your niche’s main search term and see who pops up in the top AdWords spot. (For reasons I’ll explain in a minute, make sure the top performer is not listed in the organic listings.)

The question you’re trying to answer in this initial step? “What is the highest AdWords listing that is not also on the organic results?”.

Now that you know who is kicking up the most dust in the paid search engine listings, its time to spy.

Most online marketers have heard of split-testing. Basically, it involves testing multiple variables on a web site, find out what works; keep the best and ditch the rest. The down side of split-testing? Yes, it takes what most affiliate marketers hate the most….WORK!

This “reverse split-testing” research method allows you, as a nosy marketer, to quickly peek at the incremental changes your main competitor(s) have made as they have marched to the top of the paid SERP listings.

Step 2

Go to Alexa.com and type in the domain of the top affiliate website in your niche (from above) into the “Movers and Shakers Traffic Graph” on the main page. Select the Page Views tab and notice the results.

Now, select the time period that allows you to see the entire “life” of that web site. Then, look for the dips (and significant traffic increases).

The dips presumably indicate the times that the webmaster had the site down for improvements based on split testing or, perhaps[tag-tec]Taguchi[/tag-tec] testing that had been done. I say presumably because…you don’t dominate a niche by accident. If they are at the top, you can be sure they did some sort of testing and tweaking to get there.

SIDE NOTE: This ties in to why you can’t use this method to research web sites that rank well on the organic listings. By nature, organic traffic is much more consistent than AdWords traffic so there won’t be any significant dips in traffic even when the webmaster pulls the site down for tweaks. Take a look at www.jackhumphrey.com on Alexa. Lots of spikes, no major dips. Why? Is it because Jack hasn’t done any split-testing or made changes to the website…? I doubt it. Take a look at the Wayback Machine, you’ll see lots of changes to the site. The Friday Traffic Report is an organic listings monster…Jack does not have to pay for traffic, he gets it for free. Therefore, his traffic is much more consistent.

OK, back on track… Most affiliate products are sold via landing pages and for these sites, this method is pure platinum.

Now for the last, and most intriguing, step…

Step 3

Jot down the approximate dates of those “dips” that you spied on the Alexa Traffic Chart. Now, sail over to the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org/web/web.php and type in the domain name of the web site you’re researching. Up pops a few columns with a long list of dates.

What is this?

Well, the Wayback Machine has kindly taken nice little snapshots in time of the web site in question. Now, for the best part…

Using your list of dates, you can actually see with your own eyeballs all the changes made by the webmaster from one dip to another. Look closely at what was changed from one iteration of the web site to another.

  •  Did the headline change?
  •  Did the call to action change?
  •  Did the guarantee change?
  •  Was audio or video added?
  •  What did the webmaster ditch from the site and what did he keep, etc…?

Make a list of your significant discoveries and guess what you have?
A beautiful behind the scenes list of results of what was probably an intensive (and obviously grandly successful) split-testing campaign.

One final step!

Take this lucrative data and put the principles to practice on your site and knock your competition off their snooty perch.

And the best part is…now that you know the secrets of the big guns, it will be much easier to improve your site’s AdWords ranking and conversion rate without wasting time trying to fix things that should have been ditched a long time ago.

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Tags

adwords, alexa, reverse split testing, split testing, taguchi method


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