Testing Made Easy
A Review of Leading Testing Software Packages
If any of you are *not* testing, it's a great 'confidence' booster, it can really improve the sales success of your landing pages or squeeze pages, and there are a number of good testing programs available. I've personally tested five --
(1) A B Tester -- This one actually never worked for me, and the guy was difficult to reach, but once reached, he refunded me.
(2) STA (Split Test Accellerator) -- This one is expensive $700 but does Taguchi testing, which is a method that lets you test more than one thing at a time. Instead of testing Headline A against Headline B, and then when that's done, going to the next A-B pair, you can set it up in many ways, for example, six headlines, three preheads, 3 hero shots, three subheads, three background colors. This would let you pretty much test the entire beginning of your sales letter in one test.
However, since these parameters are split up among different combinations, you do need some decent traffic to get the sample size up. If just testing two headlines, perhaps 200 visitors might tell you the answer. If you have multiple combinations to test, then you'll need more visitors so that the number of visitors for each combo is enough to give valid results.
Taguchi testing is a type of 'multi-variate' testing, but it does not require you to make sales letters with every single combo. It uses a smaller number of combinations and sorts it out mathematically.
The Split Test Accellerator will give you a free version, but it won't do Taguchi, only AB tests. This is great for free. STA takes a little work to install. It gives you lots of info, but there is a learning curve. His manual and documentation is superb.
(3) Xtreme Conversions -- This is a great tool, but is oriented toward determining which keyword is sending you the sales. If that's all that you want, this is probably your best bet. Easy to use, doesn't cost a lot. But if you wish to test more than keywords, read on ...
(4) Conversion Prophet -- This excellent. However, the revision to this program, called Affiliate Prophet, is even better. And a little cheaper.
(5) Affiliate Prophet -- MY RECOMMENDATION -- In my opinion this is a dream. It does split-tests and taguchi testing, BUT it has another model, called AIDA, which is quite simple but gives you a prediction with a much smaller number of visitors. Several of my projects have only modest traffic, so I can get answers from Affiliate Prophet in weeks or months faster than I'd have solid answers using the other programs.
Affiliate prophet will enable you to do all these things --
** Set up split tests, taguchi tests, and AIDA fast multi-variable testing
** You can send visitors to two different merchants to see which of them does better conversion, so you can choose the better affilate program.
** Test multiple 'actions' ie, measure the conversion rate of those who opt-in, and also measure the conversion rate of how many buy, etc.
** Test adwords adverts and keywords, and test organic-search keywords
** Gives you a 'heat map' or an 'xray' of your sales page with a colored band beside it, which shows *where* the visitors are leaving your page. For example, I'm testing a page right now, and losing quite a few folks about 2/3 of the way down, where there is an unordered list. Knowing that many people bail right here, it's a pretty good bet that I've made this unordered list way too complicated. It just shrieks out at me. I wouldn't have known that without this heat map tool.
Their documentation is slightly weak, but they have good video tutorials, an adequate manual, and the user interface is the easiest of all the above programs.
I'm considering creating additional learning materials. I'm kind of waiting, because they keep improving what they've got.
Affiliate Prophet advertises that it's $97, but if you buy it you'll get a one-time-offerf for the 'Pro' version, which is another $50 or so.
BUY THE PRO VERSION! Don't try to save the $50. The heatmap, and I think Taguchi, and one of the other cool features are only in the pro version. MORAL: Buy the Pro version. Expect to spend $150.
But if you don't get that back many times over in enhanced sales, then you haven't installed the software.
Below is a link to Affiliate Prophet. I could provide links to the others, but ... this is the one to get ... if you'd like to actually know what's going on with your sales page.
After personally investigating and using all of the above (except the first one which wouldn't run), Affiliate Prophet is clearly the easiest to use, the most useful, gives you answers fastest, handles everything you would want to test, and its price is reasonable.
Get Affiliate Prophet Here -- http://tinyurl.com/aprophet
Their sales page actually gives a pretty good description of how it works and what it does.
If some of you have it, and some of you get it, perhaps it would be possible to form a mini-mastermind group around the subject of testing most effectively. If enough people were interested, we would consider putting up a forum located on this blog.
-- Trevor James
A Handy 'Confidence Level Calculator'
Somewhere, recently, in some ebook I was studying, there was a 'confidence level calculator', designed for adwords.
Its purpose was to tell you the statistical confidence level that the different click-throughs between two adverts or two keywords are showing.
That is, if Advert A has shown 187 times and 22 have clicked through, and Advert B has shown 37 times and 4 have clicked through, then "how certain" can we be that Advert B is going to work better long-term.
Or put another way, any test could show results due to chance. But you can feel really confident when the difference in response is high. Or if the difference in response is small, but the sample size is very large, then you can begin to feel confident.
So sample size = big, results are probably not due to chance.
Or response difference = great, results are probably not due to chance.
Today, I was trying to see if I had a large enough sample to call a winner between two headlines and three different colors. And I was looking for that calculator.
And I couldn't find it.
However I found a different one. It looks like it measures the same thing. The 'labels' are different, because this calculator is hosted by a company that manages donation campaigns.
Input and output look similar in function:
Input "Quantity Mailed" (same as number of advert impressions) for Test A and Test B.
Input "Gifts Received" (same as number of clickthroughs) for Test A and Test B.
Click the 'Calculate' button. It will give you the percentage clickthroughs for each test, and below it will tell you, statistically, how much confidence you can have that the results are not due to chance.
Although the labels aren't obvious, this one appears to do the same calculation ...
http://www.malwarwick.com/learning-resources/confidence-level-calculator.html
Here is another calculator which has a chart, showing sample size and results and confidence level.
http://www.insightexpress.com/ix/calculators/citable.asp?pageid=148
Here's another one, which has 'conversion' labels --
http://www.prusak.com/confidence-level-calculator/
And finally, here's one that has just the right labels for a PPC advertiser --
Hope you find these useful!
-- Trevor James
