Posts Tagged ‘testing’

Image by @superamit via Flickr

I was introduced to a great website last week. It’s called Which Test Won and it really makes clear the importance of split testing.

What is split testing? Well, for every piece of marketing you do – whether it’s writing an advert or a direct sales letter, designing a website, running an AdWords campaign, or anything else – there will always be more than one way of wording or presenting your message. And without testing, you won’t know for sure which way is best.

With split testing you come up with two versions of your website landing page, sales letter, advert or whatever it is you are using, and then you put version A in front of one group of potential customers and version B in front of the other group and you see which generates the best response in terms of sales, enquiries, etc.

The beauty of online marketing is that it is actually pretty simple to carry out split testing and to measure what results you get. So even if you have a website which you think is working well, or an AdWords campaign that is generating you a healthy return on investment, it is still worth experimenting to see if some subtle changes could bring you even better results. Sometimes, for example, just changing the colour of a Buy Now button can have a dramatic impact on your number of online sales.

If you don’t believe me, you should definitely check out Which Test Won. It has loads of real life examples of split tests that have been carried out. You can play along by trying to guess which of the two different versions of each item of marketing material was most successful and then find out what way other people voted and which version was actually the winner in real life testing.

How much split testing are you doing in your business? Has carrying out this kind of regular experimenting and testing made a difference to how much business you get from the web? We’d love to hear your stories – just use the comments box below to tell us.