john martinelli

I’ve come across a few website owners recently who are simply not interested in making changes to their site. It’s “just right” or “took a long time to get it like this”. However, there’s always room for improvement and split-testing is absolutely necessary to optimize your site, sales page, and autoresponder e-mails to ensure your users are doing what you want them to do.

A/B is the most basic form of split-testing. Essentially, you have 2 copies of a page/e-mail, and you see which one performs best. The difference between a profitable campaign and an unprofitable one can literally come down to the headline you are using. So, what’s the correct way to split-test your site?

1. Find out / pick one exact call to action that you want to optimize for. Whether this is the play button for a band site’s audio player or the purchase button for a product, set up Google Website Optimizer to make this action trackable. This way, you can actually see what percentage of your users does this given action.
2. Create 2-3 drastically different copies of your current page and split-test these with Google Website Optimizer.
3. Once one of the 2 or 3 shows consistent outperformance of the others, you can start testing the individual elements of your site: headline (headline split-testing alone can increase conversions by 200%), call to action (colors, text, style, etc), color, graphics, layout, and copy.

With this formula, you can ensure that your site is optimized and performing at its peak for your purpose. Let’s look at an example of a sample site selling one product. Let’s say the page converts at 3%. This means that out of 100 visitors, we’ll have 3 purchases. If we’re driving traffic at $1 a click and the net profit from each sale is $30, we’re going to be losing $10 for every $100 worth of paid traffic.

If, after split-testing, we’re able to increase our conversion rate ONLY  to 4%, which is an extremely conservative improvement, we’re now profiting $20 from every $100 worth of paid traffic. Without even touching our traffic source, we’ve turned a loser into a winner.

After optimizing the site, you can then optimize your ads for an improved CTR (which will result in a lower CPC), as well as your autoresponder e-mails. It’s crucial to have a strong grasp around the metrics of your websites. After all, if you’re not tracking it, you can know for certain that your site is performing less than it can be with just a few, simple tweaks.