If you're not split testing you're leaving money on the table. Split testing is an absolute must for all online businesses, if you're not doing it at the moment you really should be thinking about it and if you are doing it the likelihood is that you should be doing it even more.
Without split testing you're leaving massive amounts of money on the table every single day, I say this with complete certainty. Its not that you maybe leaving money on the table, you are definitely leaving money on the table, it sounds like a ball of claim but it is absolutely, true. Whether it’s a single page sales letter site, a mini site, an absence site, a blog or amount of content site. There are always ways to treat things and increase the percentage conversion rate, if it’s a product that’s being so old. The sign-up rate if it’s membership site or the number of click through if it’s a site that earns revenues from advertising. So what exactly split testing?
Split testing is simply the process of testing out different versions of something to see which ones performs best, it could be a direct mailing piece, a billboard advertisement, a TV commercial, a webpage, an email or anything else where you want to find out the different results based on one or more changes to the original. From internet, marketers prospective it could be two different webpage you’re testing to see which designed works best. It could be testing one headline on a sales letter against another or finding out which of two or more banner adverts brings in the most orders. If possible, split testing works better with the fairly, large number of visitors, if you could vary low traffic your split testing numbers maybe inaccurate but split testing even with low traffic is usually better than not doing it all. You can just often take longer us statically valid result.
You can do split testing in various different ways. If you're running paper click adverts through Google adverts you'll find there is a split testing system built in, if you're split testing things like sales page copy, a form on squeeze page or the CTR or Click Through Rate a various placements of ads on your pages then you'll need to develop your own methods. There are many scripts and online services available that can help you to deliver different versions of a webpage to visitors. And then measure conversion from each version, if you don’t want to use a script on your online service some of which can be quite expensive you can do the same thing yourself, by rotating pages on your own.
You'll probably want to leave a page up for about a week or longer and record conversions. Then add a different page to keep a record of the conversions permit, just keep in mind conversions maybe different, this can simply be because of the certain time of the day or the particular day of the week. So if you were to take a page down in the middle of the day or in the middle of the weeks your results maybe inaccurate. The important to split testing can't be over emphasized. Something small is changing a word in your headline or even changing the color of your order bottom could potentially increase your conversions by several percent.
There has been some stories of one single word doubling conversion rates of a products. Sometimes changing something seemingly very trivial, such as the color of the words “Buy now” on a order button can drastically increase conversions and sometimes more fundamental changes. Such as using a different font for the body copy on your website can make an amazing difference.
Its worth testing almost all of the elements on our website from page backgrounds through the different head of graphics and different navigation menus. Some of your changes might consist of just minor tweaks or as others might be in the major change and the overall style of site. Pretty much anything and everything is worth testing to see if it has an impact on conversions.
Overtime, split testing will ensure that you’re using the highest converting version of your site possible. This can prove to be a long process but definitely the one that will bring you massive rewards. Imagine you at a website that was converting at the rate of 1% of you did a series of 10 test one after the other that managed to increase the response by 20% each time what do you think the final response rate would be. it would be a staggering 6.2% this demonstrate the incredible power of split testing, just by running a series of small test that each had a minor impact the response was multiplied by over 600%. So get testing then test some more and continue testing until you can't think of anything else that could possibly improve the response rate.
Paul Smithson is the creator of—and is the driving force behind the best selling Excit Pro Website Development Tool at http://www.excitpro.com Paul has set up five multi million dollar companies. One of which is now own by the BBC, he’s areas of expertise include business strategy eCommerce online and offline marketing software development and maximizing the potential of online businesses.
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