Why is it Important to Split Test?
If you’ve done any kind of online marketing, you’re probably wondering what this split testing is that everyone is always talking about. Everyone swears by it and tells you that if you do not split test, you’re just wasting your time, but what exactly is split testing and why is it so incredibly important to the success of your business? There are a few reasons for this, starting with how much information there is on the Internet and how many different reactions you are going to get to your ads, landing pages, and products.
Say for example you are trying to sell an oven at a department store. You have a sales pitch that you use to try and sell your oven and it turns out that it doesn’t work that well. You can do a few different things here. You can change your sales pitch or better yet, you can ask someone what they didn’t like about it and adjust it carefully until it is more effective.
When trying to make that same sales pitch on the Internet, you do not have the luxury of asking anyone what they thought of your pitch. It either works or it doesn’t and you’re left to figure out exactly what went wrong.
So, instead of just completely rewriting your pitch every three weeks when your data tells you it is not working, you need to create a system that allows you to find out what the problem is. This is what split testing does. It allows you to delve deeper into the specifics of your ad, landing page, or pitch and find out what is and is not working.
To do this, you’ll create a split set of copy – each set will be only slightly different from the other. You then test both sets and see which one performs better. For example, you might have two AdWords ads up and running. They’re exactly the same except that one of them has the URL of your site in capital letters and one does not. You find out that the capital letters convert 0.4% better than without, so you make sure all future ads have capital letters.
This is what split testing does – it allows you to check and see what does and does not work on a very small scale. So, it is important that you spend as much time as you can checking and rechecking each of your various ads against each other to get the perfect final copy.
Split testing is a vital part of any online business’s success. The Internet provides little or no feedback on how things work other than your results and split testing is one of the most effective and tested methods of getting results. If you can make it work for you the way it is meant to work, you’ll quickly find that you have infinitely more power over how your pages convert as you continue forward with your campaign.
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