Testing Issues and MVP Offers

In the nutra vertical, affiliates often promote offers like miracle pills that can solve all problems. If only affiliate marketing had a one-size-fits-all campaign flow that would convert well and bring in consistent profits. But alas, the marketing field is full of surprises, and it forces affiliates and marketers to constantly test their ideas and creatives. 

However, even advanced affiliates who are good at testing can still make mistakes. But making mistakes is absolutely normal. The main thing in this business is to learn from your mistakes and avoid them in the future. Besides, in order to develop your affiliate skills somehow, it is also important to try new practices. In this article, we will talk about the main mistakes in testing and introduce the so-called MVP approach.

Tests in affiliate marketing

A successful affiliate campaign is based on the principle of testing. Everything needs testing: creatives, formats, CTA buttons, text blocks, targeting, landing pages, etc. It is important to evaluate the figures correctly. To do this, affiliates set up analytic tools, and then there is a cycle of tests, searching for effective links and disabling unprofitable ones. The more tests, the higher the profit and the chance of further ROI growth.

Common testing mistakes

Any test is important. After all, even negative test results give you useful information for analyzing your work and adjusting future advertising campaigns. One important point is that tests need to be effective in order to bring profit. For sure, the ideal is always out of reach, but at least try to avoid the most popular mistakes in your next tests.

Blind faith

Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper. It is about those situations where you have a strong belief that an offer should be a success. This is what happens when you’ve spent $30–50 on an offer test and the results were negative. But, the results were there. When such tests bring only 1–2 leads, newcomers think that there just wasn’t enough budget for the test, and they invest more.

If no changes have been made to the ad campaigns before the re-run, the result will be negative. But, it doesn’t mean that the offer doesn’t work.

Wrong scale

The key to successful testing is to get the most detailed statistics. Both segmentation and the selection of different creatives are important for this. But learn to be precise and not take things too far.

Firstly, you should not test several offers at once. Secondly, you should not make testing too large-scale. For comfortable tests, 2–4 versions of creatives and 3–5 advertising campaigns are enough. And here are some reasons for that:

Limited budget. You need money for each of the ad campaigns. If you have a limited budget, you will have to invest less money in each campaign, and this will have a negative impact on the validity of the tests. You will end up focusing on quantity rather than quality.

Limited attention span. It is difficult to monitor numerous campaigns, and it would be difficult and totally unproductive to conduct large-scale tests alone. It is difficult to analyze so much data.

Limited capacity. Even if three out of ten campaigns turn out to be profitable — you will need to run each funnel to the end, since you can’t take chances. This means extra costs and monitoring difficulties.

Fears

It’s natural to be afraid of losing your budget, but don’t let it take over your mind. Fears lead to excessive preparation. Affiliate marketing doesn’t stand still. If it takes too long to learn information and develop approaches, you simply can’t keep up with the changes. The market reacts to every event in the world, and if it takes too long to develop an approach, the flow will lose relevance. So find the courage to look your fear in the eye. Where there is fear, there is a development perspective.

Weak analytics

Insufficient analytics leads to more serious errors. Especially when dealing with new GEO and analyzing competitors. You need to dive deeper into the specifics of geographic destinations, audiences, cultural sensitivities, and consumer behavior. If this work is done beforehand, you can avoid a lot of mistakes in your creatives.

The nature of MVP offers

MVP is an acronym that stands for Minimum Valuable Product. Before the offer is made available to a wider audience, the advertiser creates a trial version. It is used to get feedback from users and, with the help of this analysis, to improve the project to perfection. 

In affiliate marketing, this type of test is used in the process of preparing the advertising of the offers. MVPs help to identify the flaws in a product before spending huge budgets to promote it.

Guide for launching MVPs 

Here are some tips that can help you achieve great results when launching an MVP offer.

Identify your target

Once you have done a product checklist, you need to draw up a portrait of your target audience. At this stage, it’s worth working out what pains people will have with the product, and who exactly should be offered it. Understanding who might be interested in the product allows you to create effective creatives and fine-tune your targeting.

Provide additional audience triggers

Even if you know what a potential customer looks like, you may miss out on other important points. You should always know what to offer people so that they don’t go to a competitor. Take all points into account before making a move.

Specify the USP

USP is a unique selling proposition. It is everything that makes your product exceptional and motivates customers to buy from you. It’s very cool if the USP overlaps with user triggers. You should offer more attractive terms than your competitors.

Final thoughts

The path of an affiliate marketer is full of difficulties. No one is perfect, and we can often stumble over various mistakes. But a wise affiliate is not one who only learns from his own mistakes, but also one who learns from the mistakes of colleagues. Also, an MVP offer will become a great approach to testing the viability of your ads. Try different ways of testing the variables, analyze the results intelligently, and you will get an A+ for sure.