aff spot: Applying Sabermetrics to Affiliate Marketing

Ooof. What better time to check and see if my Shotgun Rationale plates sold on ebay. Bye.

Over the past several months I’ve been attempting to go deeper than simple A-B testing with sites…  I’ve been applying Sabermetrics to Affiliate Marketing.  For the non-baseball fan, Sabermetrics is the invention of Bill James.  His utilization of standard reference observations of the game and logical analysis of real results has turned what everyone thought about baseball on it’s head.

For example, different stadiums have profound effects on an individual ballplayers production.  Stealing bases is unproductive.  Much of what we credit to pitching is actually defense.  His approach is to listen to what the game itself is telling us objectively.  Which is exactly the kind of analysis we need to be doing as Affiliate Marketers.

Here are some questions that the application of Sabermetrics can answer for us.  With identical websites does the use of one CMS over another affect SERPS?  Is there a difference in profitability in using your own dedicated server over shared hosting?  Does the selection of a particular offer show greater click-thru by using one network over another network that has the identical offer?  What elements (i.e. cart, banner, newsletter list, pop-up on abandonment, etc) are the most to least effective?

We all think we know the answers to these questions.  But do we really know?  How much is being left to random chance without a true understanding of what is really happening by measuring and analysing the results of more than a simple A-B test?  I think that we’re leaving alot of money on the table here.  I think we don’t really know what we’re doing..  We just think we know.  And I think I’ve discovered the way to find out for sure…  Sabermetrics.