The following is a guest post by Max Vorobyov who is a conversion specialist. Max has worked with many CPA networks and their in-house traffic teams to help increase conversions on all in-house PPC, PPV and CPM Media Buys traffic. In this blog post, he shows comparative characteristics on how they managed to double the number of in-house sales by applying 3-level-deep conversion optimization strategies for three types of profitable traffic – PPC, PPV and CPM Media Buys. The three levels are – traffic sources’, creative and landing page optimization.

Each and every day countless millions of dollars, Euros and Pounds change hands in the online universe. Affiliate marketers is one of the largest forces that is responsible for a large chunk of the money being transferred every day between buyers and sellers.

However, not every affiliate marketer is a success. The purpose of this article is to help you become more successful. You will see how a CPA marketer optimizes (maximizes) conversions for different types of traffic. You see, good-old days when a marketer could’ve slap a page/web site together, send some traffic to it and 40 days later cash a check – are long gone now.

This article is not going to talk about SEO (search engine optimization). It will show you what other marketers are doing with traffic, creative and a landing page to literally make their fortunes.

Let’s see what could be done to minimize spend and maximize conversions on the first – traffic sources – level:

PPC: You only deal with one traffic source — a search engine that you buy clicks from. For the sake of giving a solid example let’s look in PPC’s purest form – search engine traffic only. The keywords you bid on are your traffic sources. Traffic source “red shoes” may or may not convert as well as “buy read shoes”. While optimizing a PPC campaign at the traffic source level – a CPA marketer will pause “bad” (non-converting) keywords and only leave those that convert.

PPV: The 800×600 pop-up ad is shown to visitors of a) specified web sites and/or b) specified keywords. Savvy affiliate marketer will watch his conversions like a hawk eventually disabling traffic sources that suck money out of his pocket and leave only those that put money in his pocket.

CPM Media Buys: Display advertising world with its wonders and mysteries. An affiliate marketer picks and chooses web sites (traffic sources) where his IAB standard size banners 300×250, 160×600 and 728×90 will be displayed. After gathering initial data, numbers will clearly show which individual sites (traffic sources) are producing and which aren’t. Sites where traffic doesn’t convert are disabled.

That was easy, wasn’t it? Now, let’s talk about optimizing the creative:

PPC: As we have agreed earlier we’d look at PPC traffic in its purest form – traffic from search engines. While there is a choice over text ads or display ads, search engines mostly display text ads. Smart PPC specialists split-test different ad copies and base their decisions – as to whether or not cut the ad off – on factors like CTR and Conversion Rate. Higher CTR means lover CPC but conversion is the king. Creative is optimized by split-testing of text ad elements such as headline and body copy. Best performing ads that get clicks and convert – stay. Least performing ads – get paused.

PPV: No easy answer because there is at least a dozen strategies affiliate marketers use to make money with PPV traffic. The way you optimize creative for PPV traffic depends on your business’ strategy. The 800×600 pop-up will open whatever page you direct it to. In some cases you may not need any creative optimization at all. Or, on the other hand, if an affiliate marketer is in list building or short-form lead generation – several custom 800×600 landers should be in rotation and constant testing.

CPM Media Buys: Creative optimization for CPM media buys is one step more advanced compared to the PPC example above. An affiliate marketer will need an AdServer. AdServer is a software application that delivers banner ads to the requesting web pages. It is used for displaying and tracking impressions of your banners. The rest of the optimization strategy is similar to PPC creative optimization. But, in CPM media buys case, marketer works with banners. The goal is to maximize CTR while maintaining profitable conversion rate. Banners with low CTR and low conversions get cut off. Banners that produce desired ROI get more impressions… New banners, based on the best converting design/message, should constantly be tested as well.

By now an affiliate marketer has only interested buyers coming from selected traffic sources clicking on the best performing creative.

The next big step is to improve landing page’s conversions:

PPC: Super-affiliates use tools like Google Website Optimizer, Vertster, Split Test Accelerator (to name a few) to increase the number of conversions that a landing page generates. Simple A/B split-tests or more advanced multivariate testing experiments identify the best converting combination of elements. Each and every element of a landing page like: headline, sub-head, product images’, call to action, background colors, audio/video – influence consumer’s decision to buy or not to buy the product. Each and every element is tested by super affiliates. “Killer landers” aren’t stumbled upon, they are engineered…

PPV: Once again – no easy answer. Some affiliate marketers are doing extremely well with direct linking landing pages supplied by the affiliate network. Others doing even better with custom host-and-post pages. Another group of affiliate marketers build huge lists or generate quite a bit leads using custom landers. I’d say the landing page optimization strategy for PPV traffic depends on the campaign’s as well as marketer’s personal goals.

CPM Media Buys: Multivariate testing script or software application absolutely must be used because A/B split testing is not enough. A couple of thousands of clicks will show what combination of elements work. I’ve seen a few landers where 80% of the content was loaded into the multivariate testing tool. It was basically a template full of JavaScript or PHP code where the new combination was showed and tracked every time.

See a more detailed example of how 3 levels of conversion optimization could be applied for the CPM media buys – read the special report with 59 screenshots spread over 25 easy-to-scan-through pages http://bit.ly/kOZYHO . No opt-in required.

Affiliate marketing is fun. It also requires a lot of work. However, the work you put in, the optimization you do can (and will) pay off many times over in the form of money, lifestyle and, most importantly, respect of other marketers.

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