I would like to know how to go about testing a products conversion rate. What is best to use? Adwords? Also, is direct linking better than landing pages? Thanks!
conversion rate is simply the number of sales (or email submits, or whatever else depending what your objective is) divided by the number of visitor to your sales page (or landing/pre-sell page whatever)... Adwords is not for testing products conversion rate... it's for advertising your sales page... but of course you can test your conversion rate through adwords... but it will not test traffic that came from other sources (e.g. organic listing, etc) direct linking in Google Adwords is almost impossible, some other PPC network is still possible. whether it's better or not, you have to test it.. it depends on your offer, and so much other factor.
You know you can just use clickbank reporting for this? Just go to the "analytics" report to see how many sales you get and divide that by the number of clicks through the hoplink. Now if you are talking about how to get the traffic to actually click the hoplink then your question should be "how do I get enough traffic to test out conversion?" Is that what you mean?