Split Testing for Poker Ads
A technique rarely used by poker webmasters is split testing, or A/B testing. Split testing is a process where you isolate a single factor on a web page and test 2 different versions of it in order to see which version performs better. It's an old technique that classified ad wizards used to use to measure an ad's pull. They would run 2 different ads, with only 1 word changed from ad to ad, then measure the difference in response.
I used to run split tests constantly on Google Adwords campaigns. (This was back when Google would still let you run a poker ad.) At
the time, ads were listed in an order determined by your cost per click times your clickthrough ratio. The higher your clickthrough
ratio, the higher you came up on the list, so getting a good clickthrough ratio was doubly important.
By changing 1 word at a time, it was pretty easy to eventually design an ad that pulled a big response rate.
What does this have to do with being a poker webmaster?
Almost all poker webmasters are working under at least 1 affiliate arrangement. So they're getting paid based on how well their ads perform. By split testing various banners and ad copy, a poker webmaster can gradually improve the performance of an ad until it's performing far better than the original ad.
If you take a banner for Full Tilt Poker that's getting a 1% clickthrough ratio and replace it with a banner that gets a 2@ clickthrough ratio, you'll send twice as many leads to their affiliate program. Twice as many leads means twice as many players. And the logical conclusion is that twice as many players means twice as much commission.
Some web page elements that you can try split testing include:
- Animated banners versus static images
- Image ads versus text link ads
- One size banner compared to another size banner
- Placement on the top right of the page compared to the top left
The trick is to isolate only 1 element at a time and measure your results closely. Little changes add up to big differences at the end of the month.
If you're advertising 10 different poker sites, and you're averaging $500 in commission from each of them, you're making $5000/month.
If you can double your clickthrough ratio for each poker site you advertise, you can double your income from each program, and make $10,000/month instead.
That makes split testing worth doing.