In this article you will discover one of the important things every marketer needs to know: split testing.
Split testing simply means to test your ads and optimize it in a continuous basic. Usually the ads created for release first time is not perfect. You don’t know if your ads is good or not without testing it. It is often the case that what marketers think that “it should work well” and turns out that no body care about it.
Unfortunately, since marketers do not know all the answers, so they need to test their stuff. For example, if you are writing PPC ads, split testing is a must in order to get high click through rate and lower cost. If you are writing sales letter, you may want to split test your headlines and copy. Even the position of an “Add To Cart” can be tested. After testing, you will get a lot of insight and result from what you have done, and you can optimize it accordingly.
There are a lot of split testing method, but the basic one, and probably one of the most effective one, is A/B testing.
How to do split testing
To use PPC as an example, doing split test for PPC ads means that, you create two sets of ad copies with only slightly different headline or text. If you want to sell watch, you can write two headlines: “Excellent Watch At Discount” and “Premium Watch At Discount” and see which one get high response rate after one week. If the first headline gets a good response rate, you drop the later one first, duplicate the successful one and make another changes again.
You are not limited to change the headline only. You can also change the ad copy and see which runs better. If you want fast test result, you can also create more than one ad group to test different things at the same time. The only drawback is that the cost of running those test may increase rapidly.
Same things applied to sales letter: you change the headline of the sales lettter and record the number of calls/orders received. Then after one week you change your headline, ad copy, case studies or buy button to see if it will get more result. Or you create two copies of sales letter at the same time, and drive traffic to these two copies and see which one goes well. You can easily do it by using Google website optimizer, which is a free and easy to use tool.
By now I hope that you can make use of the knowledge of split-testing and create a better web experience for visitors and customers, and make more money from it.