Split Testing Tutorial: AB Testing That Works (& Makes You More Money)

Key Takeaways

all right hey what is going on guys today we're going to talk a little bit more about conversion rate optimization tips and specifically how you can make your call to actions on your affiliate website the most effective that they can possibly be all right so what are we going to cover today it's going to be a lot about a b testing and why it's important uh how you can go about setting up a basic a b test of your own and as part of that we're going to go over where to place your affiliate links in order to have the most success and a couple of tips for how you can create urgency and fomo in order to drive more sales and how you can actually do this on autopilot if you have a wordpress website so why should you care about this stuff well in the a in the seo world a b testing is a unicorn it is easy it's immediate and it's really really cheap to get started so something like this doesn't come along in the seo world very often so for that reason alone it should absolutely be in your tool set and the psychological principles that i'm going to go over today they affect everybody they affect me they affect you and they're absolutely going to affect an end user who doesn't even know you know anything about marketing or copywriting or anything like that and having good call-to-action best practices it's going to get you more sales without having to get more traffic so let's say your seo skills are a little bit rusty uh these tips are gonna be good for that or if you just took you know traffic loss for maybe an update or something and you're looking to just recover some sales without having to recover your rankings for the most part all right so we're gonna go over a b testing here with a real world example so let's say you have a website that's getting around twenty thousand visitors per month and you've got some average stats here you've got a five percent click-through rate on your affiliate links with a five percent conversion rate of those clicks so it's going to get you a thousand clicks per month and about 50 sales um so let's say you make it 30 bucks a sale the monthly revenue of that site is going to be around 1500 bucks and if you go to sell it's going to be worth around 45 grand which is good but it could always be better so let's say we had a successful a b test we still have that same 20 000 visitors per month but now we've upped our click-through rate on our affiliate links from five percent to seven percent um so instead of a thousand clicks per month we're now getting 1400 and instead of 50 sales we're getting 70. so we're keeping that same 30 dollars per sale our monthly revenue is now 2100 and we've increased the sale valuation from 45 000 to 63 which is an increase of 18 000 so that's pretty self-explanatory of the value behind this especially since you can get started you know with a b testing for free so it's really a no-brainer all right so what should you be testing you can literally test anything which is why i love doing this uh but if you're just getting started maybe you've never done this before some of the basic things that you can test is your call to action placement you know what a button text might say different colors the layout and design of your website and also the key areas of content so the content leading up to your call to action you can tweak what it says there to see how changing that affects sales alright so regardless of what tool you use there are some best practices when running these tests and the most important one is a single variable test everything because if you have three or four different variables going on in a single test it doesn't matter if the result is positive or negative it's impossible to tell what variable actually impacted change there so if you want to have good actionable data make sure you're single variable testing everything now if you test on your highest traffic pages it's going to get you the quickest results but at the same time make sure that you run that same test on multiple pages so that you know you're not getting some quirky result on one page might not be relevant to other pages and if you want to optimize your workflow here test multiple ideas uh before making changes across the board so get three or four positive test results before you go making changes to your entire website and just another thing to note here if you have a tool that creates a new page make sure that uh that new page is either nofollow canonicalized or both all right so we're gonna go ahead and dig into a real world example here so this is what an affiliate you know buyer's guide type of page might look like you've got some products here get your call to actions content chart product summaries pretty basic stuff so let's say we want to test uh you know maybe this this button is green the whole website's green maybe we won't change it's red we have a suspicion that might increase sales we don't know until we test it so let's go ahead and do a test here all right so the tool that i use is called nelio it's a wordpress plugin um they didn't tell me to you know name drop their product i've just used it before it's inexpensive and it's really user friendly so i like it so what you're going to do um this is with a free version so you can actually get your toes wet with a b testing without you know putting any money down so we want to run a test on a page here all right so what this tool does is it's going to take all of the pages that are on your site and allow you to pick the one that you want to run the test on so you want to button color to red so this is what you're changing on the page to name your test that you also want to set up a goal here so for an affiliate website nine times out of ten this is gonna be a click on your affiliate link so um you can do amazon or something else but let's just use amazon because everybody's familiar with that obviously if you had different affiliate programs you would make the goals that so uh if you want to track a conversion here we are looking for a click to an external url amazon by default it's going to include the url that matches an expected value exactly you don't want to do this because then you would have to create goals for every single affiliate link and that's really cumbersome so what you can do instead is a url contains the expected value so this is going to trigger a goal every time a url contains the word amazon that somebody clicks on so if you're using another program obviously put that there and if you're using amazon make sure you also include the shortened link as well let's go ahead and save that all right so we're gonna edit the page and what i really like about this tool is that it inherits your native page builder so on this website i'm using thrive nelio is going to give me thrive to work with when i am making changes to the site and also what it does here is it automatically de-indexes it but if you want to be crazy like me you can also put the og url here so that it's canonicalized so editing it in thrive here so again we just want to change the button color here from green to blue or sorry green to red we're going to change it from forest green to core red people make that change there [Music] easy as pie go ahead and save that all right so now you have your variant version here with the colors change and you still have your original page with the green buttons so you want to go ahead and save this as a draft because it doesn't actually publish the page until you start the test so you don't have you know extraneous pages lying around so this guy is ready to go so let's go ahead and start this if this were a real test you let it run get some traffic and the tool is going to analyze that traffic and let you know whether you know the variants better or the original url is better so in this test you're able to see the page views that each version has the conversions based on your goals down here the conversion rate and with the free version you don't get this but with the paid version you can also get a heat map so instead of just saying hey this version is better you're actually able to see where people are clicking which is super super cool for making informed decisions um so that's how you would do that so let's go ahead and pretend we have some clicks here and go ahead and stop the test all right so once you have your data if it's a bad result you can either reapply the original the original you know design or you can just from right here apply that variant design to the page that you ran the test on so it's one click uh super easy that's why i like this so you know it's worth trying if you've never tried it before just kind of see what happens so outside of just changing the button colors you can actually use psychology on a website to increase sales so the principle that i'm going to go over with you today is called the gutenberg principle essentially what this says is that people read in a z pattern so they're going to be reading from left to right and then top to bottom and you can capitalize on this by placing your call to action in places where people are naturally inclined to pause while they're reading so places like that could be the right sidebar the right side of a chart top left and bottom right of content summaries and stuff like that so this is an example of what a product summary might look like you've got your eyeballs on the page here they're gonna start in the left and they're gonna look right back left again and back right so the best place to put your affiliate links in this case it's going to be the start so the top left and the bottom right so this is you know best case scenario you can also place it in the top right here people are going to pause a little bit there to look at the image generally speaking though you want to avoid putting your affiliate links you call to action the bottom left just because people kind of you know they scan over that section so uh link link and link all right so cruising along here um another psychological principle that you can take advantage of is freshness so people like to know that they're getting the most up-to-date information and now with that being said you should still be updating your content on a regular basis but there's some you know hacks that you can use to make your content look more fresh than it actually is so my favorite uh version of this is changing the month and the year and the title tag and you can use a plugin like yoast or rank math they have dynamic date insertion so this just updates automatically for you so you can do the same thing within content using a plugin called they leave short code for current date um so in addition to having your title tag save the month of the year you can also you know maybe under your h1 have last updated the month uh january 2020 2021 whatever it is you can also uh if you have a sale that you know is continuous instead of just saying this product's on sale you can fill in today's date so it says this product is on sale today whatever the heck date it is so it's going to make people think you know i need to jump on the sale right away so on that note fomo activation so people have this innate fear of missing out and if you create a sense of urgency you can activate fomo in order to get more sales so a couple ways you can do this is with evergreen countdown timers highlighting missed opportunities so past sales so you can say something like this product was on sale last month for 30 off this month it's 15 off next month the sales going away so people are going to understand that sales come and go and they're going to want to jump on the existing sale they have right now so you can also highlight deals on exit intent and offer essentially people to get on your email list for exclusive deals that might not be available to everybody and if you do this just make sure you have an exclusive code that is specific to your site so that people you know they feel like they're actually getting a discount that is specific to your website so key takeaways here a b testing is cheap it's fast and it's going to increase your sales so if you're not doing it i highly highly suggest giving it a try you're going to you know make more money with the same amount of traffic by doing that and as part of that use these psychological tendencies that i talked about today to your advantage so stuff like placing your call to action in areas where people are likely to pause and taking advantage of tools that are out there to you know create urgency and fomo and kind of doing that on autopilot um so that's what i got for you guys today i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you got something out of it uh thanks for watching you