How to Go About Split Testing Landing Pages
Since starting your online marketing career, you’ve probably heard a huge amount about how you’re supposed to be split testing everything you do. There is good cause for it and you’ll thank yourself in the end for being thorough enough to know if your sales tactics are actually working. However, one of the most complicated tasks when it comes to split testing is taking apart and analyzing your landing page piece by piece. It also happens to be the single most important thing you can do though. If your landing page is as effective as possible, you can boost conversions much more than with any other single tool at your disposal.
So, what exactly should you be doing when split testing those landing pages? It starts with knowing exactly how much you can change on the page at any given time. Landing pages are tricky because if you make too small of changes your results might not give you anything to work with. However, if your changes are too great, you might end up negating any changes you make or worse yet, making your site perform poorer than it was before.
So, what exactly should you be working on when you start making landing page changes? First off, you should try to create an atmosphere on your landing page that is conducive to changes. Whether or not it is visible or not doesn’t particularly matter. What does matter is whether or not you are able to easily go in and edit things as you create them.
Things that you can use for split testing include your headlines first and foremost. You should always split test headlines and subheaders. Not only are they vital for catching attention, they have a profound effect on SEO – making them a great starting place (you want to have them set as early as possible so that you can ensure they are not changed). Additionally, you can change the formatting of the page, such as the colors used for text or the background. Some people adjust the text formatting size or font, while others will tweak with actual content, rewriting how the text is presented (another good reason to have it segmented up).
One of the top ways to do all this is to create two or three landing pages at once and then set them up on the same domain in rotating cycles. Use AdWords to draw traffic to each page in equal numbers and then check and see how conversions alternate between sites.
Ultimately, if you can effectively split test your landing page, you can assure that whoever visits the site is as likely as possible to actually sit down and buy your product or service. Not testing and finding out what does and does not work makes it so you never really know if your strategies are working and that’s not something that anyone wants to get stuck with. Split test, use your data, and increase your sales.
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