Split Testing is The Secret of Internet Marketing
We have all read about the importance of testing your marketing campaigns to improve sales and conversion rates. But how many of us honestly follow the advice?
I admit that I sometimes slack off testing, and only god knows how much I’ve lost by not keeping track of my marketing campaigns. Here’s what I mean.
I recently started split-testing my Wordpress Adsense System campaign again, and when I checked back after 100 clicks on two separate pages I was shocked. No kidding. Spot the difference between these two headlines:
HEADLINE A: 100 clicks, 0 sales, $0 profit
The headline above was the original headline that I settled for when I first wrote the salesletter. I did only minimal testing on it using Google Adwords.
HEADLINE B: 100 clicks, 4 sales, $268 profit
This is the second headline I tested. What’s the difference?
ONLY ONE WORD!
In other words, just changing one word in my salesletter is going to increase my profit by 400%. Amazing, isn’t it? The old version of the headline already made me $9,000+ so I can only imagine what the figure would be if I had done this earlier.
Like I said, all the gurus scream at your face “You have to test, test, test!”
But when the salesletter is up and the sales are coming in, how many of us actually bother to make things better. There’s always room for improvement, but how many of us lift out heavy fingers?
Now, how to put theory into action?
To test your marketing campaign on the Internet is EXTREMELY easy to do. Since everything is just a matter of creating different links, you can do what’s called “split testing” easier than it would be in an offline situation.
What is split-testing?
Split-testing means that you split your marketing campaigns to two different ads. The first one is your winner and the second is the loser. You continue to delete the loser and create a new ad that can beat the winner, until you get to a point where the difference between the loser and winner is diminished or becomes irrelevant.
You cannot split test three ads at the same time (in most cases) as it would be very difficult to compare your results.
Lets say you have a product and you want to sell it on the Internet by advertising it. Create two different versions of the ad to start with. Then, get at least 200 visitors to those pages, and split the traffic between the two different ads. So 100 people see ad 1 and the other 100 see ad 2.
At the end of the day, after you managed to get 200 visitors to the site, see which ad made the most amount of sales. This as is the winner, and the other ad is the loser. You delete the loser and create a new ad to challenge the winner. This process keeps going as you find better, more effective winners.
Here’s a few things you can analyze in your marketing campaigns to improve your opt-in, sales and repeat purchases:
- Opt-in Pages - If you’re leading prospects to an opt-in page before they see the sales page, then you can improve on the % of opt-in by split-testing. If you’re using Aweber, they have this feature. You just create 2 different opt-in forms for 2 different pages, and see which one converts better.
- Sales Page - Create 2 different versions of your sales page, and see which one converts the most. The improvements you make on your sales page will directly inc erase your income.
- Open-Rate - This statistic shows how many people open the emails that you send. An open-rate of 30-40% is considered good, which means that out of every 100 people you email to, 40 actually open your email message. With Aweber you can create “split-test-campaigns” to test different variables of your email. You can basically create 2 separate emails, send one to half your list and the other email to the second half.
- Click-through Rate - The percentage of people that click on the links in your email. This can be tracked by most good autoresponder software.
Split-testing your offer and products is the most scientific way to making more money on the Internet. If you do split test than you can logically make more with the same amount of traffic and the same product. The fact that most people don’t do it also plays to your favor, because if you do it you’ll beat your competition and they won’t even know what happened.
If you don’t have a split testing software with your autoresponder or shopping cart system, you may want to try Hypertracker. It allows you to test almost anything you want easily without any technical hassle.
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Thanks Gobala for your WordPress Adsense System. It really helped meto get started with blogging, which I had no knowledge about in the past. I was able to set up my blog with 2 days.That's amazing!John Tan
JohnTanBlog.com
Hi Gobala,
Cool blog. Have added you to my bloglines.
Had a question: how do you create those cool graphics?
Freehand or do you use a specific software?
kind regards,
Ankesh
I used an A4 paper and a marker pen
Then colored it in Photoshop…
Hi,
Nice info, I hope to try it out someday.
kenwahfu(health harmony=prosperity)
Great article. Now what about if you have a site based on WordPress as a CMS. More sites are now built this way. How do you do these split tests? Is there a good WordPress plugin for this? Have you used one and can recommend one? Thanks!
Wow, I just discovered this split test WordPress plugin and it has a video about it too (love videos - so much easier to learn with them).
I will have to try this plugin out!
Video on the split test plugin:
http://highenergyvideos.com/testit/testit.html
Page about the plugin:
Split Test Plugin For Wordpress Is Here! - http://firepow.com/split-test-plugin-for-wordpress-is-here/
If you try it out, let use know your thoughts on it. Thanks!