If you have a website with over 200 visitors per day, and you make sales or leads through your website, then you’ll want to consider split-testing your audience.
There is a time where testing might be less helpful – if your customers can’t interact with you online. If your business only has a phone number to call, then the best thing you can measure with testing is engagement, and not actual sales; it’s less useful when testing your site if you can’t measure results.
If you have important actions for visitors to take, such as:
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contacting you through your online form
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making a physical or digital purchase
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signing up for your newsletter list
…then split-testing becomes very valuable because you can track conversions. So let’s dive in!
What Is A/B Split Testing
Split-testing allows you to create different versions of your website, and test them against each other to see which one drives the most sales.
You don’t have to test your whole website though; you can create variations of just a single web page (such as a sales page) and then see which variation gets you the most sales or conversions.
It’s called A/B split-testing because you split your traffic between variation A, and variation B, and then test to see which ones provide the most results. You can have unlimited variations, so you might have variations C and D too!
In the above image (courtesy of Nitro Interactive), you can see that:
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variation A had a 34% conversion rate
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variation B had an 8% conversion rate
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variation C had a 13% conversion rate
A 34% conversion rate means that 34 out of every 100 people who viewed the page took a desirable action (such as buying a product, or whatever you wanted to test).
Programs To Use – Free & Paid
If you’re on a tight budget and have time to spare, then try out Google Content Experiments. It’s free, and you just need to have Google Analytics installed on your website to use it.
The free price tag comes at another type of price – it’s time intensive. In order to make an experiment, you need to create a brand-new web page for every variation. Installing the tracking code can also be a bit of a pain, but it’s totally doable by simply following Google’s documentation and having the patience to deal with any technical hiccups.
For a more intuitive solution, you may want to try Optimizely. It’s a paid program, but comes with a 30 day free trial (after that it’s $19/month).
Optimizely is great because you can set up new variations in less than 5 minutes, and they have a very easy-to-install code that you can put in the <head> of your entire website; you never have to install it again, no matter how many experiments you conduct.
It’s much easier to use than Google Content Experiments, but obviously there is a monetary price, which we think is totally worth it.
Starting Your Own Experiments
To get started with your own experiments, try one of the tools above. You’ll want to have some goals in mind; do you want to increase sales, or increase leads? What is your most important sales metric right now?
Once you’ve determined your exact goals, you’ll want to come up with different elements to test. You can test:
- headlines
- colors
- fonts
- images
- navigation (or no navigation)
- headers
- footers
- and anything else you can think of.
Recommended reading: 71 things to A/B test (by Optimizely)
You may want to hire someone to do these types of tests for you. At One Yellow Tree, we’d be happy to help you with that, though we’re also just really happy to be teaching this to you, so feel free to use your newfound knowledge to try out your own experiments!
Next week we’ll be going into part 5 of the “Visitors into Customers” series, where we’ll be talking about name dropping.
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