Omniture Articles
FAQ: How Can I Incorporate Testing Into My Affiliate Program?
Using testing with your affiliate program makes as much sense, or more, as incorporating it into your paid search campaign. Here's why:
Your top affiliates have the potential to drive very different segments of visitors to your site - and the behavioral characteristics of those segments can vary greatly, depending on the affiliate source that drove them there.
For example:
If you're selling home loans, visitors driven from an affiliate site like The Motley Fool (catering to a financially savvy audience) will behave differently than visitors driven from, say, Suze Orman's site (geared toward people with less financial knowledge). With the former group, you may be able to drive straight for an application. With the latter, more reassurance, branding, and tools could go a long way towards converting a browser to a customer.
You may find, in fact, that the behavior of these segments varies far more than the behavior of different groups driven by different search terms or different search engines.
Look at search in the broadest sense: we know that people who search on Google vs. those who search on Overture behave differently (Overture searchers respond less well to overt calls to action than their Google counterparts, according to a recent MarketingSherpa article, for example). If searchers on such a broad level can be so different, imagine how varied your visitor segments can be when coming from sites that target very narrow niches.
So identify the affiliates that drive the most traffic to your site, and build targeted landing pages.
Then, try testing various elements in each of those targeted pages: longer forms that get you more information from the financially savvy visitors, shorter forms that may be less intimidating to those with less financial knowledge.