Tweet

How To Consistently Improve Your Web Site Results

Written by: Jennifer Horowitz

Article Overview: Split testing is also known as A/B testing. It is the process of taking one page (your control or page A) and then creating another page (page B) with one single change and then driving equal traffic to both pages to see which page gets a better result.

How To Consistently Improve Your Web Site Results

Testing is vital to the success of your website; it is a powerful strategy for increasing the effectiveness of your site pages.

Split testing is also known as A/B testing. It is the process of taking one page (your control or page A) and then creating another page (page B) with one single change and then driving equal traffic to both pages to see which page gets a better result.

I love split testing because it takes the guess work out of your marketing. I really love it when testing proves me wrong – it’s a great way to learn and it improves my results. If I were to just go with what I had thought would win, I would be constantly getting lower results than I can now get with my new page which has proven to pull better results.

Recently this happened, I created a sales page (page A) with a great headline, and then I created my page B with a different headline in place. I had fully expected my page A to win. But it didn’t!
The truth is we just don’t know how the market is going to respond and even with proven marketing concepts in place and great copy, we just can’t predict the response. With testing, we don’t need to predict. We can accurately and scientifically determine what is going to work and improve our results.

Think about it, you are running various campaigns and driving traffic to various pages anyway. Why not get the most out of those pages and increase your response without increasing your expenses?

Here is a quick and simple breakdown of how to split test:

Step One: Identify a page with an offer on your website that you would like to test.

Step Two: Create another variation of that same offer (in order for an A/B test to be accurate you can only change one thing on the page)

Step Three: Place your split testing software code on your site, and drive traffic to the pages.

Step Four: Review the results and determine which page was the winner. That page is your new control page, and you can now create a new page B to test something else. The idea is you keep testing and keep improving the results.

You can test anything, but here are some of the most common things to test:

• Pricing (example: $9.95 versus $12.95)
• Headline color (example red versus blue)
• Headline text
• Header graphic versus no header graphic

There are so many testing softwares out there, but I’m really surprised there hasn’t been more discussion about Google Website Optimizer. It’s such a great tool – and it’s free!

For those of you that don’t know, Google Website Optimizer allows you to split test (and even multivariate test your pages). Typically if you want to split test you have to buy expensive software that requires installation and configuration. With Google WebSite Optimizer it is so simple. You simply set up the 2 pages, paste the URLs into Google and then add some code to the pages that Google provides. You can be up and running and split testing in no time.

If you aren’t currently split testing, I guarantee you aren’t getting the maximum benefit out of your website and you need to start!

Related Articles
  The Top 5 SEO Strategies For Dominating Search Engine Results
  How Does Google Search Engine Works?
  Finding the Best Keywords to use on Your Site
  How To Easily Improve Your Google Rankings
  How Can You Improve Your Alexa Traffic Rank?

Article Tags: campaigns, drive traffic, guess, marketing concepts, proven marketing, simple breakdown, software code, testing software, truth, variation



Related Forum Posts
Re: What I Enjoyed Reading This Week - Oct 14 - I really enjoyed the Improve your vision with an app article in the New Scientist. I don't wear glasses and think a lot of people cripple their vision by wearing specs from an early age instead of exercising their eyes... Nice to see someone has developed an ap that will help.
Re: Success - I study success intently, and would like to share: Here's two excellent and nearly identical success-formulas from a couple of the world's masters. FIRST FORMULA: 1. Passionate Desire 2. Clear, Definite Purpose 3. Committed Decision 4. Take Action In Faith (Bonus Secret Sauce: 5. Repeat Consistently) I made a video about this, but am not allowed to link it yet. Google "Ryze Success Steps" for it. Oh, and this is Napoleon Hill's (Master Of Success Laws)'s Formula. SECOND FORMULA: 1. Passionate Desire 2. Understand It Is Already Done (Faith) 3. Relax & Allow It To Unfold (Go about your life calmly) This one is courtesy of Abraham-Hicks (inspiration for the movie The Secret). Hope that helps!
Re: Hello from the UK - Hello! What part of the UK are you from? Site looks good, how are you marketing it and what do what want to achieve?
Re: Reduce Bounce Rate - Website bounce rate matters most today. You can decrease by providing 1. Good Web Layout And Design 2. Relevant and unique content 3. Content clear and proper navigation 4. Improve website loading speed 5. Add relevant images 6. Analysis of keywords 7. Minimize pages 8. optimize your target keywords 9. Good quality of links 10. Take People Where They Want to Go
Run a major competition - You beat me to the punch LoveInventions! I was just on my way to post this! The idea is simple: run a competition for a major prize to get people posting. In this case Darren put up a $729 Nikon DSLR up for grabs as the top prize. The winner was selected randomly and each post you wrote gave you another chance to win. [quote:1nc4sv0r]The Goal - the aim of the exercise was simple. To sign up new members to my forum and increase page views. My hope was to have a bumper month but also get new members signed up to have an ongoing impact on overall activity going forward.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Traffic - Over the full month traffic was increased 66.7%.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: New Members - Recruiting new members to the forum was another goal of the competition. We’d had an influx in January of 1803 new sign ups as a result of a previous smaller competition but since had been around the 1200 per month. April however saw a boost in numbers by an extra 2823 members.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Activity - Another bonus related to increased traffic is the increases in user activity on the forum. Here’s the increase in new ‘threads’ to the forum (up from the 1500’s to just over 4000 for the month). And here is the increase in new posts (up from 1400 per month to over 43000 for the month).[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r] The Downside So far it’s sounding fairly rosy isn’t it. Increases in traffic, members, activity and even earning are all good. However there was two downsides. 1. Moderation Workload - I have an amazing team of moderators to DPS but the month of April was the hardest that they’ve ever worked. I totally underestimated the extra load upon them in setting up this competition. It has made me reconsider how I run future competitions. 2. Impact upon Quality of Reader Interaction - over all the increased activity of the site brought in some wonderful new members who are interacting on the site with genuine interaction. However a small number of new members were just there for the competition - even though I made it clear that spammy entries wouldn’t win. This impacted moderators workloads but also the overall morale on the site a little. I think we managed to contain it but again - next time I run a competition it’ll not be based upon post numbers but rather some sort of quality level of interaction.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] What do you guys think? Is it worth testing out? Considering we already give out over $1,000 in month prizes, what would be the ultimate prize that we award at the end of the competition?


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

A Guide to Franchise Financing

How to Sell to the Price Driven Customer

Why Use an Advertising Agency

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.