Did you know that you can A/B test your Amazon Associates links with Geniuslink? It’s as easy as 1,2,3!
- Setup the Tracking
- Setup the Link
- Review the results
What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing
is a surefire way to refine your marketing practices, allowing you to easily draw comparisons and figure out what practices work better than others. With A/B testing, you’re using
the scientific method
to make smarter marketing decisions, with findings that are backed up by hard data about what your online audience finds valuable!
A/B testing
is a method of comparing two or more versions of a webpage, link, or app against each other to determine which one performs better. Each
A/B testing
link is essentially a mini experiment where variants of a page are shown to users at random, and easy analysis can then be used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.
As visitors are served either the control or variation, their engagement with each experience is measured and collected in an unbiased manner. You can then determine whether changing the experience had a positive, negative, or no effect on visitor behavior.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you’re an affiliate marketer who is reviewing a keyboard on your blog. Within your blog post, you have a link that sends people to Amazon where they can purchase this awesome keyboard you’re reviewing.
In your previous Amazon Affiliate marketing efforts, you noticed that linking to a search results page on Amazon had different conversion rates that linking directly to the item you were reviewing. You have a theory that linking directly to the item is the best practice , but you want to back that up with real, concrete data. How can you do that? A/B test!
A/B Testing with a geni.us link
Luckily, you’re savvy enough to use Geniuslink for all of your Amazon affiliate links , which means you can create an A/B test directly through your link. A/B testing with links allows you to build a link that directs half of the clicks directly to the keyboard you’re reviewing, and the other half to a search results page. Once you’ve set up an A/B test like this and generate a statistically significant amount of clicks, you can know once and for all which type of link converts highest.
Here’s how to conduct A/B testing with Amazon links in 3 steps:
Step 1 – Setting up the tracking
To begin with, you want to see concrete evidence of how each of your tests perform. It’s best to use commissions or the number of items sold as the metric you use for comparison. To get accurate results with the Amazon Associates program you’ll want to create a separate “Tracking ID” per option in your experiment. This will make more sense in the third step but trust us for now.
To do this start off with going to the Amazon Associates dashboard then, in the upper right-hand corner selecting the “Manage your tracking IDs” in the drop-down menu currently showing your username (or click here ).
Click to add a new tracking ID. We’d recommend to give it a name you can remember or at least call it something with “control” in the name to stay in line with our scientific method.
Next, you are going to log in to your Geniuslink Dashboard and create a new group. You do this by clicking on the “Groups” tab then clicking the button to “Add a new group.” Give this one a name you’ll remember, probably something similar to the tracking ID you just created.
Now you want to add your tracking ID to this group you just created. To do this jump over to the “Affiliate” tab and click the button to “View / Edit Overrides for a group” and select the group you just created. From there Click to “Add a new override” and paste your first tracking ID, that is likely using a similar name, into the text box.
Be sure to select the relevant options to match up the tracking ID for the desired country in the drop-down menu.
Congrats! Now repeat this process for each additional option, the “experiment” variable, you want to test. For example, if you wanted to do a straight 50/50 test then you’d create one more unique tracking ID, one more group, then do the override process one more time to combine the two.
Note, additional help on setting up groups and assigning overrides can be found in our Knowledge Base : Managing Groups / Overrides
Step 2 – Building the A/B link.
Now you are ready to build the intelligent link to do the testing !
Start by clicking the Links tab in the Geniuslink dashboard and paste the first Amazon product link into the link creator. Be sure to assign the link to the first of the groups you just created , then click to save it. We’ll call this your “control” destination.
Repeat this process for the second Amazon link you want to test using the second group you created. Your “experiment” destination.
You should now have two individual links. Here comes the magic!
Now click the blue “New” button and chose the “A/B Split” option. You’ll paste your first / control geni.us link into the first “Destinations” box and the second geni.us link you created, the “experiment,” into the second “Destinations” box. This link can be assigned to any group you want.
Set your desired percentage split for each URL and click “Save.” Boom!
Now take that link and publish it somewhere that it will get lots of attention and clicks.
Note, you may not believe how cool this is and want to test this link yourself. Feel free to do so. If you notice the first few times that you only go to one destination it’s important to know that we do a weighted distribution via math. This means that over time it’ll match the weights and be very accurate.
Step 3 – Checking on your results.
Great, you got a bunch of clicks, now it’s time to see if your “control” or “experiment’ performed better. To do this jump back into your Amazon Associates dashboard and click the reports tab.
From there you’ll want to click on “Tracking ID” and view your tracking IDs so that you can select the two you are using for your A/B testing . This is why that first step was so important!
Now take a gander at your results. Which tracking ID resulted in more commissions?
If named memorably this tracking ID should remind you which link and destination you used and who the clear winner of your experiment is. If you can’t remember you can always jump back to the Geniuslink dashboard and quickly dig up that information.
Interested in reading more?
If that was insightful then here are a few other resources you might enjoy about A/B testing and the Amazon Associates program:
Geniuslink Blog: The Intelligent Link: A/B Testing
Geniuslink Blog: Strategize: Tips for A/B Testing Social Content
Geniuslink Knowledge Base: A/B Split Testing
Amazon Associates Blog: How To Set Up A/B Testing