Split Testing Offers Big Improvement in Listbuilding
By Shawn CaseySplit testing is a handy tool in improving your website. Unfortunately, it’s also time-consuming and a bit of a skilled process. Luckily there are several tools out there to assist the process, but you should shop carefully. It evaluates the placement of your headlines, your text, and other elements, as well as what guarantees and any other statements you have on your site to maximize the conversion rate in visitors to your website.
Split Testing Improves Conversion Rates
Basically, split testing compares two versions of a landing page on your website to see which is better than the other in terms of drawing in traffic and thereby improving conversion rates. It’s a more scientific process than just looking at the page every week or so and trying to imagine what is actually going to work in making the website more visibly appealing and rank higher on search engine results. Your landing pages don’t necessarily have to be sales pages, either. Subscription pages and lead generation pages count, and it would be useful to test them, as well. As long as it’s a page where you’re collecting information from a visitor, it’s presumably wise to test it.
Also, you’re not limited to landing pages in what you can split test. Nearly any web page you have on the Internet – such as home pages, squeeze pages, or even media archives – can be evaluated by split testing. Any given Web page can benefit from a split test. All the same, these aren’t quite as important to test as your landing pages, especially your conversion pages. It’s all a matter of how much time you really want to put into your website each week.
Website Optimizer versus Taguchi
There are many brands of split testing software out there. The two most popular brands are Google’s website optimizer and Taguchi. Most people that don’t care to shop around will settle early on for the Google website optimizer. It’s a more simple process than some other kinds of split testing software, but it also allows for fewer personal “tweaks” in the split testing process.
Taguchi’s tool is a highly popular bit of software for split testing. This software does multi-variant testing. The reputed benefit of multi-variant testing is that you can perform more tests with fewer clicks and less impressions than other software. However, some test runs of this product have shown that there is often a significant variance between the results given in tests by Taguchi and the actual sales results. This could possibly imply that Taguchi isn’t as accurate enough in the multi-variant testing to be credible at this point.
In short, the effectiveness of any web page you have can be advantageously split tested to maximize its conversion rate. However, due to the possible amount of time you might actually want to spend or pay someone for, you might want to limit your actual split testing to the few pages where you actually collect money or information from your visitors.