TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

On The Hunt for the Elusive 1.3% Conversion Rate

Ever since my last post, my focus has been completely on trying to reach a 1.3% conversion rate on a particular campaign I’m running.

I’ve been making good progress, but soon I’ll have to take a short break from affiliate marketing because I’ve really been neglecting my other work and errands I need to take care of.

Before I share what I’ve been doing to try to increase my conversion rate, I should probably tell you something I noticed late last night.

Before I started using landing pages on the campaign, I was actually running a direct link straight from the traffic source to the offer – I wasn’t using my tracking program (I use CPVLab) because it was easy enough to calculate performance on-the-fly by simply looking at my SubID’s on the network stats. It’s also faster than setting up a new campaign with tracking (even though it seriously only takes 30 seconds…).

Then, when I started using landing pages to split test performance, I switched the campaign’s direct link to rotate with my landing pages in CPVLab. Because of this, an extra step in the process is added because CPVLab needs to redirect to the landing page even though it’s a direct link, in order to track it. It’s all very fast and usually doesn’t have much of an affect, but when comparing the conversion rate (CR) of the direct link without tracking to the direct link with tracking, there was a huge difference – around 40% between the two.

Without tracking, the direct link was converting at 1.1%, while with tracking, it was converting at 0.71%. Now, this campaign is pretty new so I don’t have a huge amount of data yet, but it is pretty statistically significant as I’ve done around 800 leads so far. I’m hoping that the two will even out more as time goes on, as I really don’t like the fact that the extra redirect step of tracking is having such an effect on performance.

I am now actually sending a small bit of traffic to the original direct link again, even though I do have over 1,400 leads of data sent to it already, just to make it more statistically significant.

ANYHOW, my point is that while my goal is still to hit 1.3% conversion rate, that it’s not as good as I originally had thought as I was already getting 1.1% by direct linking before I added it to tracking.

Don’t get me wrong though – even going from 1.1% CR to 1.3% CR increases my ROI from 83% to 116%. That’s why I was so excited in my previous post.

In contrast, a 1.5% CR would be 150% ROI, so for every $500 I spent, I’d get back $1250 in return ($750 profit).

This is why my focus is on trying to hit 1.3%. If I can manage to get to 1.3%, then my next goal will be 1.5%.

Multivariate Testing

I purchased LandingPageGenius a couple of days ago, but didn’t install it until yesterday.

It wasn’t too difficult to install, integrate with CPVLab, and modify my landing page to work with it, but it did take a little time and reading of the documentation.

I now have it down pat except that I haven’t tried using its built-in landing page rotator yet (it seems a little tricky to me).

Anyhow, since I am still new to it, I only set up a simple test on it so far. I took my top converting landing page and then added a headline element to it, and set up 6 headlines for LandingPageGenius to rotate through.

Here are the results:

That’s pretty crazy, eh? Again, they are all identical landing pages except the headline is different on each page, and we see conversion rates ranging from 0.36% to 1.04%. This was with a total of 54 conversions, too.

I will try more multivariate testing soon (this is really more like a randomized A/B split test since I’m only testing one element at a time).

3 New Landing Pages

In addition to setting up multivariate testing, I also ‘paused’ my lesser performing landing pages and created 3 new ones. They are all based on the top performing landing page, except each one has different type of animation-based effects.

For example, one of them flashes in the taskbar, one of them has its call-to-action button blink, and the last one has its call-to-action button flash (it doesn’t disappear like it does when it blinks).

What I should have done though, which is what I’ll do for future campaigns, is start off by creating a number of completely different landing pages, about 4-6, and then pick the top one and start using variants of that, such as 2-3. Then I should have picked the top converting one of those, and utilized multivariate testing to split-test the various elements of the landing page to improve it further, such as headlines, call-to-action, images, etc.

I believe this is probably the best method to finding a winning landing page.

This time around was a bit messy and random, but it’s also the first time I’ve dealt with landing pages in quite a while so I’m a bit out of practice

Anyhow, here are the results from some of my landing pages thus far:

Now, some of these have a lot more traffic sent to them than others, so they aren’t all that statistically significant yet, but they shouldn’t deviate too much.

So far, the leader is Landing Page #1 (with Headline #3) at 1.04%, but this is one of the pages that needs more data before being accurate as it only has 16 conversions sent to it so far.

Since the majority of the landing pages are all very similar, I’m going to create 2-3 new ones with different bigger changes made to them to see how they perform. Remember, my goal here is to hit 1.3% CTR.

So there’s an update for you guys. As mentioned in the beginning, I may slow down a little bit to try to catch up on other things, but I’ll still be cracking away at it and will have those new landing pages up either today or tomorrow.

Wish me luck on hitting 1.3%!