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I’m sure you would agree that split testing and affiliate marketing go hand in hand. 

It can also be difficult to figure out what to split test first.

In this article, you will learn how to go from newbie to a split testing ninja so that your campaigns have a fighting chance at becoming profitable.

Why Does Split Testing Work?

Because split testing will help you identify which ad will give you the cheapest cost per 1000 impressions (CPM), highest CTR (click through rate) and lowest CPC ( cost per click).

Let’s consider what factors impact whether Facebook shows your ad:

• Who you’re targeting
• How you’re targeting your audience (demographics, interests, custom audiences, geo’s, etc)
• How many advertisers are bidding for the same audiences you are
• The campaign objective for your ads
• The quality of your URLs on your bridge page
• The quality of the Facebook Page that you are running your ad’s from
• Your Ad text and creatives
• How much the ad set spends on a daily basis

Creating a process where you strategically analyze multiple variants in your campaign can help you work with the algorithm for results instead of trying to outsmart it.

Staying organized and having a clear goal will help you make sure you are tracking everything correctly is the first step..

The  data will tell why or what you should start split testing in order to increase the particular KPI ( key performance indicator) that is the bottleneck of your campaign and influence Facebook's decision to let your ad win the auction against your competition.

In the end, you will put forward the best ad that will help you get the cheapest CPM for your campaigns.

Split-Testing Allows Data Take The Steering Wheel

The first mistake you can make is being too ambitious and wanting test everything you possibly can. What you don't want is a pile of data that is hard to understand as a result of throwing 50 ads  in one ad set to start a new campaign. 

Testing too many variables too soon will do more harm than good.

Let’s assume that the ads that publish are approved and running. Now is your chance to dive deep into your data and figure out what makes your audience tick.

• What exactly are you looking for?
• What makes one ad different from the other?
• What exactly are you testing?

Remember, the signs will  be in your data.

So what do you analyze first?

CPC

For starters, you should be keeping an eye on what variables can improve your CPC. 

Is your CPC Is higher than expected?

Then that means that you need to focus on designing more appealing ads. Your offer and the audience that you are targeting may have good, but your ads aren’t getting any action. 

Focus on creating ads that get the click. That should be your main goal. 

To make your audience click on your link and take action you can: 

• Make sure your call to actions on your landing pages are clear and more assertive
• Test different headlines
• Rotate images and ad copy to find the right pattern interruption to pull your audience in

CPM

CPM higher than expected?

Then your offer is good but the audience who is seeing it is not interested. If your offer doesn't appeal to certain genders or ages in your audience then you test a new one. You can also play with targeted interests or even custom audiences.

On the other hand, having a high CPM can also mean that your audience targeting is correct, but you may not have presented the offer to them in proper context. That's why you should have multiple variables of ad copy or images to see what works best on your ads. 

CTR

The CTR is the key to making sure you have cheap CPM's and low CPC's. High CTR's imply that the ad's performance can be potentially good for your campaign.

Even though having more clicks means more leads to your offer,  you can also risk the chance of having a high CTR where your ad spend can go towards clicks that don't convert. 

Split testing to see what makes your audience click on the ad and the landing page will help you optimize your campaigns for more conversions.

How to Split Test Like a Boss

Keep It Simple

Again, too many variable cause too many headaches. You'll have data , but you wont have any data you can organize and visualize clear patterns from your campaign.

The simplest thing to do is to test 1 variable at a time , find the winner, and the move on to the next set of variables.
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For example, let's say you have one offer. You want to test 5 different images. Use the same ad text and headlines for each image in the ad set instead of having different copy. 

Facebook will optimize and test which image creates the best performing ad. 

From there you can test your winning image and then test that one image with different ad text in another ad set.

After the testing for this new combination is complete, you will have now found your winning image and copy. Then you can also move on to the Headline and Description that goes at the bottom of the Facebook ad.

Automate Your Split Tests for Accuracy

You can kick your split testing into high gear with some of your tools.

Using third party performance tracking software will give you additional automation functionalities. For example, in Voluum, you can rotate offers directly with your campaign.

Sure, you can set up 2 campaigns in Facebook ads manager and just analyze your data later. But think about how much time you can save  if you automate the process and let your tracker filter out your traffic for you. 

For instance,  you can set up flows in your tracker you can rotate landing pages for different traffic sources.

Once you have your Facebook ads campaign all set up in your tracker,  to test your different landing pages and set up the offers strategically and you can make the entire analytics process a piece of cake.

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Be Obsessed with Organization

According to Google dictionary, the word system means a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.

To make sure you’re entire campaign ecosystem is good to go, you’re going to need a system. 

But not just any system. You will need a way to keep track of your ads in your tracker and also in your campaign planning.

You will need one that is organized and can be accessed easily. One that will save you time, keep you on track, and help you identify patterns faster.

Dynamic URL Parameters

This gives you the ability to track your campaigns directly from Facebook ads into your tracker. 

When you are testing mulitple ad variants, you can label your ad sets and ads accordingly. In return, you can glance at your data and easily tell where your clicks and conversions may or may not be coming from.

The dynamic tracking parameters can be built inside of Facebook's ads manager or within your tracking software. The great thing about tools like Voluum is they have tons of templates for traffic sources already uploaded into the platform.

You can add your own dynamic tracking tokens to your URL in Facebook manually if you want. But Voluum makes things 20x's faster and easier.

For Facebook, all of the dynamic tokens are already inserted for you. When you create your campaign URL within Voluum to insert into your ad, it will push back the the information added from the Traffic Source settings and it append to the URL for you.

https://my_lander.com?cpid=3a568dca-587d-4c8b-9001-60d79f9ba59e&campaign.name={{campaign.name}}&campaign.id={{campaign.id}}&adset.name={{adset.name}}&adset.id={{adset.id}}&ad.name={{ad.name}}&ad.id={{ad.id}}&placement={{placement}}&site_source_name={{site_source_name}}

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After your ad gets published and starts getting clicks, the data will be sent back to Voluum for you to analyze. You simply pull up the campaign, access your Reports, and choose the appropriate variable that you want to review.

Create a Launch Schedule

Keeping a launch schedule and or a spreadsheet organizing what copy you’re testing is your ticket to the bank. 

Knowing exactly what is working when you are ready to scale is going to bring in the profits that you have seen in my YouTube videos. 

Organizing exactly what you are testing helps in case you may have multiple winners that you can use in your campaigns. Likewise, if you have plenty of losers to choose from, just cross them off the list and take them out for the ad set.

Split Test Based on Your Goals

As you are split testing make sure you know where true interests lie. The more in tune you are with your audience, the better your results will be.

Sometimes its as simple as just testing an image, color, or ad copy. But factors like page speeds, translation, angles can make or break the success of your campaign.

Variables You Can Split Test:

• Pre-Landers
• Load Time
• Headline
• Questions / Angle
• Colors / Images
• Facebook Ad
• Creative
• Ad Text
• Headline
• Description
• Campaigns
• Audiences/Targeting
• Geo’s
• Objectives

Let's face it.

Not every campaign you start is a winner and profitable offers are getting harder to find.

Or worse.

You may not have the slightest idea on how to figure out if it's even worth it to continue running your offer and and a low daily campaign budget if you're just starting out.

But what if I told you there is a strategy that will help you identify profitable campaigns without any experience?

In fact, it's the exact same strategy I've used to to help me make $10,000 a month with Facebook ads and affiliate marketing.

In today's article you will the 3 Day Rule and how you can use this system to test profitable campaigns.

This method will help you separate your emotional attachment from not getting clicks and stop you from to drawing  assumptions about the results of your campaign.

Let's Dive In...

The problem is most affiliate marketing beginners don't know how to scale their ad spend budget beyond $10 -$20 a day. 

The 3 Day Rule eliminates any doubts you may have on whether you have found a campaign that you need to stop, continue to run, or get ready to scale. It gives you a simple system to follow so that's you know what your next steps should be after reviewing your data.

The beauty of these set of guidelines  is it helps marketers running any type of ads for any vertical, niche, or traffic source, understand how to analyze data correctly to determine which campaigns will be profitable to scale.

In no time, you will become efficient in optimizing conversions during the early stages of campaign for various traffic sources, including:

• Mobile Advertising
• Push Notifications
• Mobile Pops
• Native Advertising
• Display Advertising
• Search Traffic
• Social Advertising

In this post, I will breakdown how this strategy helps you correctly identify which ads you will be able to scale, the variables that impact your results, and how to increase your profits beyond the 3 Day Rule.. 

What Is The 3 Day Rule

The 3 Day Rule is a combination of marketing theories and strategies that I have learned during the course of my own CPA marketing success. It's not a golden rule, where in every case the same thing happens, but it can make a difference in your campaigns.

To understand the 3 Day Rule we must first discuss the core principles regarding supply and demand. In economics, you have to determine how much to price a certain quantity of a desired product.

In your case, the desired product is paid traffic.

If the demand for that product is high, then price will also be high, because keeping up higher quantities will come with higher costs. As a result, this creates a shortage of that product. 

On the flip side, if you have too much quantity of that product, the price is usually lower. The price decreases because there is more supply than there is demand. This results in surplus of the product quantity. 

The point in where supply and demand meet is where the the price and quantity stabilize. This is called equilibrium. That this generally where you always want to be with your paid traffic data and costs.

So how does this all tie into the 3 Day Rule and how will this principle help you make money online?

Instead of price and quantity swap out price and quantity for ad spend and data. 

Think of it like this. 

Price represents the ad spend for your ads. The data you buy is represented by quantity. Your goal is reach equilibrium so that you are not spending too much or too little for data for inaccurate quantities of paid traffic. 

The ultimate goal is to buy traffic at to collect the most amount of accurate data possible at the lowest cost. In return, you should be able to review the minimum information needed to make a data driven decision, or minimum viable data. 

The minimum viable data you review after completing the 3 Day Rule will help you determine if you needed to stop, scale, or continue running your campaign. 

Why The 3 Day Rule Helps You Achieve Profitability

You need an anchor to keep your emotions at bay when things don't go as planned with your campaigns. 

Assumptions will hurt your campaign. You can risk getting inaccurate data that you cannot analyze by stopping your campaigns too soon if things are not going as planned.

If you happen to be more optimistic than practical and think that you are supposed to immediately start getting conversions for every campaign that you run, then the 3 Day Rule will bring you back to reality.

As a beginner, with the 3 Day Rule you can test a new offer or vertical on a economical budget as well. This in return will help increase your profit margins as a beginner.

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How To Get Started

After you have joined an affiliate network, you will need to select an offer to promote. 

Next, you need to setup a complete campaign that you are ready to drive traffic to for 3 consecutive days. 

If you need step by step training on how to set up your affiliate marketing campaigns, you can click here for access to a complete training.

When To Stop, Start, or Scale Your Campaigns

You should have a complete overview on the potential of a campaign being profitable within the 3 day period. 

The data that you should monitor closely is your CPC, Link Clicks, and Conversions.

Things like CTR (click through rate), Landing Page CTR, EPC (Earnings per click), and ROI (Return on Investment) are important, but those should be reviewed at a glance until you reach the 3rd day.

As you are monitoring your costs, impressions and CPC, you need to keep track of how many conversions you have received throughout the life cycle of your campaign.

For each ad set, follow these conversion guidelines. If you have:

• 8 conversions or less you need to stop or kill that campaign
• 9 conversions  means you should be at break even , keep running the campaign and optimize
• 10 or more means you should be profitable, it's time to scale.

Even if you have to stop your campaign, you should still look at the data so that you can  modify certain things for your next campaign.

If you have an offer that is at break even, you should take advantage of performance tools like a link tracker to identify where your opportunities for optimization are.

In addition to your conversion data that fires back from the pixel, you will need to review other things in your campaign, like your ad copy, creatives, or targeting, just to name a few.

How To Scale The Winning Campaign

There are two general strategies you can use to scale your ads.

1. Automated Rules
2. Duplicate

Automated Rules

There is a feature that automates your scaling process. At ad set level, you increase the budget, set specific time frames for changes to be made in your campaign, and set automated percentage of increases.

If you stay below 20% you will not reset the learning phase.  If you set your percentage any higher it will make the pixel to re-optimize the audience.

Duplicates

This is the best strategy to go with. Just duplicate the winning ad sets and increase the ad spend at ad set level. You only need to duplicate the ad once.

Be sure to change the name variables in the duplicate ad sets and ads.

Wait 3 more days and scale the new winners.

Remember: New ad accounts should be scaled slowly. You should increase your budget in small amounts. Start at $10, move on to $20, 50, $150 and so on.

If you a little experience under your belt and have a seasoned account then you can try to do what I do and scale from $10 to $500.

In the video below, I explore on the topic in a little more detail. 

Beyond the 3 Day Rule

Below, you can find a video series I have started a called "Beyond the 3 Day Rule". 

In each video I will talk about one changing variable that you need to test.

There are multiple variables involved like creatives, copy, angles, placements, pre-landers, etc...that will affect the performance of your campaign.

Sometimes you may not know what to do with the winning ads or how to proceed with ads that break even.

The 3 Day Rule is a straight forward system to follow. As a beginner it can help you focus on testing more campaigns instead of wasting time one that will never be profitable.

If you want to take your affiliate marketing campaigns to the next level then you should join me my affiliate marketing forum, the AFK Forum. You will have access to resources that will help you reach your goals. 

Make sure you don't skip testing or risking the chance of burning through valuable ad spend on your new campaigns.

 In the long run, you grow apart from the 3 Day Rule as you'r daily budget grows. Make sure you always refer to your data and focus on no being too attached to your campaigns that may not work out. Good luck.