How Split Testing Can Help With Conversions

Split test­ing your land­ing pages is a great way to fig­ure out what works and what doesn’t. Basi­cally you will use a rota­tor of some sort to test out two dif­fer­ent pages to see what works best. They are basi­cally the same, but slightly dif­fer­ent. After­wards you take the stats and see which one con­verts more. Let’s elab­o­rate on this a bit.

Let’s say you have a land­ing page built for your affil­i­ate prod­uct (or your own). You have the copy writ­ten out, pic­tures are added, tes­ti­mo­ni­als, guar­an­tee, the works. It’s all set up and ready to send traf­fic to it.

What is a Site Rotator

You can use site rota­tors, such as pageswirl (or oth­ers, there are tons of them) or you can set up a script to split test. Basi­cally it means you will put 2 dif­fer­ent sites in this rota­tor and when some­one clicks on your link it will send them to one of the two sites.

When you have a healthy flow of traf­fic, half will be sent to one page and the other half will be sent to the other page. You can then take these stats and fig­ure out which page is con­vert­ing vis­i­tors into customers.

Using a Rota­tor to Split Test

The rota­tor will allow you to fig­ure out what page does bet­ter. But here is the key to this. Both sites will pretty much be the same thing. They will have the same copy, same pic­tures, same everything.

Except for one element.

There will only be one dif­fer­ence between the two pages. And here is why:

When you have every­thing the same between the two pages, they should con­vert the same. But take one page and change just one ele­ment. Let’s say the head­line. Now you have two pages that are exactly the same except for the headline.

Now, after some time, maybe a month or two, check your stats and see which page con­verts more than the other. If your orig­i­nal still con­verts bet­ter, keep it and try a dif­fer­ent head­line on the other page. If the other page con­verts more, use that head­line instead.

Split Test­ing Makes Your Page Con­vert Better

The point is to tweak and change the lit­tle things on your page, one at a time, to make tight, well con­vert­ing page.

Try dif­fer­ent ele­ments too. Maybe you could try some dif­fer­ent pic­ture, change your lay­out, switch out some tes­ti­mo­ni­als, add more tes­ti­mo­ni­als. I could go on all day. But you would be amazed at how some­thing sim­ple can change how well your page does. Change one word in your head­line and you just might con­vert 5% more then before.

Exper­i­ment and try dif­fer­ent ele­ments. Just make sure you only change one thing at a time. Keep every­thing con­trolled and you will know what changes make it bet­ter or worse.

You can also use this tech­nique on other ele­ments besides land­ing pages. It’s is a use­ful mar­ket­ing tool.

~Chris

Have you tried split test­ing? Did it make a dif­fer­ence in your con­ver­sions?

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• How to Find Well Done Head­lines and Why They Work
• How to Cre­ate a Face­book Page (video)
• Why Tes­ti­mo­ni­als and Social Proof Work

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