Test and Compare

Page Design & Text

Once you have found your best merchant for a particular product, then you need to find the best way to present that merchant on a page. Do you have an image, paragraph then link? Multiple images? Detailed text? Do you use bold text? Do you focus on the price or features?

As in skinning cats, there are multiple ways of doing things. This doesn't have to turn into an intense exercise that bores you to tears, just simple changes to a page once a week or month can tell you a great deal of information. Statistics are an affiliates best friend. See how your page is currently performing - then make a change (eg. the price in bold text and a slightly bigger font) - then wait a week or month and see if there has been any improvement.

Now, to complicate things, any improvements or failures through your testing could be influenced by other factors such as seasonal, world events, etc, so you should look closely at the click-through rates. Number of visits to your page can be down to all sorts of things, but of those visitors, what percentage of them clicked on your link to a merchant? That's the figure that your page presentation experiments can affect.