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Landing Page Optimization With AB Split Testing

By Gobala Krishnan

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 26Mar2011 Word count: 849 Viewed: 196 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Landing page optimization is one of the most important aspects of making money online. In fact, it's the one thing that separates super affiliates from the rest of the pack. But what is landing page optimization, and how do you go about doing it?

Firstly, a landing page as you may already know is a page that you drive traffic to. In some cases, a landing page is also known as a sales page or an optin page. No matter what it's called, the purpose of landing pages is to funnel your traffic and convert them to sales or leads.

When you have your landing pages setup, you need to go out and get traffic. You may have heard that traffic is lifeblood of any affiliate marketing business. The more traffic you get, the more money you make. Although that is true, there's only that much traffic you can get with a limited budget and time.

The real lifeblood of an affiliate marketing business is conversions. If you can convert your traffic to sales more efficiently than others, you'll be the dominant player in your niche market within a short period of time. As far as optimization goes, there are basically two kinds of tests you can do on your landing pages.

Multivariate Testing for Landing Page Optimization

Hardcore conversion experts preach about Multivariate Testing or MVT. In a multivariate test, you test a combination or different elements on a single page. It's the fastest way to improve your conversion rates, but it has two flaws.

The first flaw is that you need to get loads of traffic for MVT. If you cannot get a few thousand impressions per day, then it will take forever. In fact, for low traffic sites MVT can actually derail your landing page optimization efforts.

The second flaw is its complexity. If you really want to do MVT, you need to study MVT. You need to be able to develop effective test cases and elements. You also need to be pretty good at interpreting results. There's a tendency for low-traffic site owners to accept variations that are not yet proven to work. That's when MVT backfires and actually drags you landing page conversion rates down.

AB Split Testing for Landing Page Optimization

AB split testing on the other hand is much more simple. All you need is two web pages, web page A and web page B. Both web pages are identical except for the single variable you want to test. For example if you wanted to test your main headline, then only that variable is different on both pages.

Once you've setup your simple AB test, you split your traffic between the two pages and observe your sales or leads. After both pages have achieved a reasonable number of conversions, you'll be able to see the winning page. You then remove the losing page and setup another page to test with the winner.

You repeat this process with different layouts, different ad copy, and different headlines until you find the best possible landing page. You'll know you've found it when your AB split test results no longer show any significant difference between pages no matter how much you test.

Can you test more than two pages at a time? Of course you can, but keep in mind that the more pages you add to the AB test, the longer it will take for you to get any kind of meaningful result. That's why I recommend that you test no more than three pages at a time.

With AB split testing, landing page optimization gets much simpler and faster. You don't need a whole lot of traffic to get meaningful results. You don't need much technical knowledge either.

Pitfalls of Landing Page Optimization

Although the benefits of optimizing your landing pages are immense, there are several pitfalls to avoid. The first is inconsistency. When you're tweaking and optimizing your landing pages, you need all other variables to be consistent. Do not change your landing page designs, your source of traffic or other elements when testing a page. Doing so will only give you skewed, inaccurate results.

The other pitfall to avoid is redundancy. Keep track of the elements you have already tested. Do not repeat tests when you already know the best possible variable for the test. It's very easy to be running around in circles instead of moving forward.

The final pitfall in landing page optimization is ineffective software. Keep the time you spend setting up and managing software to a bare minimum. Focus you efforts on the landing page content and sales elements. If you have to constantly upgrade or troubleshoot the software you're using for landing page optimization, you're really not doing your business any help.

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