Split Testing for Website Effectiveness

Creating your website with fresh, unique content and ensuring that you have dynamic, interactive components is a secret to your online marketing success. These are great ways to increase traffic flow to your website, attract search engines, and make your site ‘sticky’ so your visitors will stay longer. .

But do you really know if you are optimizing your marketing efforts and taking advantage of every possible opportunity to increase your sales?

Split tests

One way to make sure your strategies are effective is to utilize ‘split testing’. Split tests are simply A/B Testing methods that look at the most effective ways to promote your website and products.

When you use split tests, you can increase your sales by giving your target audience more of what they want. Your conversion rates will increase as a result of leveraging split testing data to constantly improve your content. With the results of these tests, you can make small changes and tweaks in your website content that turn into major differences in conversion rates.

With split testing, you are able to increase the traffic to your website and search engines love to see more traffic. They also appreciate and reward well-designed websites that are easy to navigate. Split testing can help you with all of this.

If you think split tests aren’t necessary, you may want to think again. Serious online marketers know that split tests can determine the effectiveness of many things on their website, including:

• Page titles
• Page headers
• Headlines deep within your site
• Site design
• Product descriptions
• Surveys
• Colors and graphics

Split testing can evaluate almost anything on your website. You then have data to make decisions that will increase your marketing potential. The only things you need to conduct split testing are (1) an active website, and (2) split testing ‘tracking software’.

Types and tools

Single variable testing is probably the best way to start. You’re evaluating one aspect of your website at a time with this method. It’s fairly quick and easy. You can access many split testing tools on the Internet, but Google has a great free tool. All you need is an Adwords or Analytics account to access their split test tool. Other tools are listed below.

Once you’ve become comfortable with single variable testing, you’ll want to progress to multivariate testing so you can test many more factors at the same time. It’s much more detailed and provides a lot more data and feedback.

Some other split testing tools available to you include:

• SplitTesting.com (free)
• Google.com (Website Optimizer, free)
• AWeber.com (free)
• SplitAnalyzer.com (cost may be worth the added features)
• Verster.com
• Free-ab-split.com (free)

There are many more tools available and your search engine will help you find them.

Transparency to visitors

And don’t worry about your visitors. They’ll never know you’re testing your website. They’ll see the exact same thing every time they return to your website. The tools make it possible to always route your visitors to the original page they visited – whether it’s page “A” or “B”. While they are browsing your pages and evaluating your products, you’re gaining valuable insights into what makes them purchase and what is effective for your website. You can now see how your conversion rates will benefit from split testing.

Visit some of the websites listed above to get more information on split testing. You’ll find that it is not only simple and inexpensive or free, but it is an effective way to learn more about your customer preferences and what they value. It will increase your conversion rates and sales while saving you time any money on unnecessary promotional efforts.

Do it often for success

Don’t make the mistake of split testing once or only sporadically. Customer preferences change over time and it’s important to stay on top of what they want. It’s best to have a schedule to deploy split testing strategies to continually gain information and insights on what your customers like and dislike. As your content changes on your website, test to see if customers find it appealing and effective. Test your prices periodically to see if they are still working for you by using different pricing models to see what works best. You’ll be happy you’ve taken the time for this when the search engines reward you with higher page ranking too.

Using the split testing tools available and responding to the demands of your target audience can make a difference in traffic to your website, repeat visits to your site, conversion rates, page ranking, and better overall sales.

Both you and your customers will benefit from your efforts.