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Why and How To Do A Split Test

By Mark Garland

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 09Apr2008 Word count: 585 Viewed: 330 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

A split test is a wonderful tool that marketers use to increase their conversion ratios, their sales and their profits from their marketing efforts. I can pretty much guarantee you that if you aren't using split tests in your marketing approach that you are quite literally throwing money away. Split tests are used both in the offline marketing world as well as in the online internet marketing world.

So what exactly is a split test?

A split test is a technique used to create the most profitable marketing message by testing various components of that message to maximize the effectiveness of each component. Here's an example that should make the concept clearer to understand.

Let's say you create a brand new ebook that you want to sell online. However, you really don't know how much you should charge for that ebook. You can use a split test to figure out exactly how much you should charge. Here's what you do.

Create two versions of your web page that is selling the ebook. On one version you can put the lower price and on the second version you can put the higher price. You then want to send the exact amount of traffic to both versions to see which version of the page performs best. The lower price page might generate more sales and more profit than the higher price page. The lower price page might generate more sales, but less profit than the higher price page. Sometimes, believe it or not, the higher price page might generate more sales and more profit than the lower price page.

Why is it important to split test? By split testing, you identify what works best in your marketing approach so that you can maximize sales and profits in your business. For example, let's say the higher price page generated more sales and more profit than the lower price page. If you would have just went with the lower price without split testing the different price points, you would have lost out on a lot of money.

There are many different components of your marketing message that you can split test. You can split test the price, the headline content, the headline color, background color, graphics vs. no graphics, an opt in before the sales page vs. just a sales page. You can split test video vs. no video or audio vs. no audio. Be creative and you will be able to come up with tons of different components in your marketing approach that you can split test.

Once you do a split test and you come up with a winner, the next thing you want to do is identify another component that you can test or come up with another variance of the component that you tested previously. For instance let's say the price that you tested was $37 vs. $67 and $37 won. Maybe you might want to test $37 vs. $47. The reason why is because the $37 price might outperform the $67 price, but the $47 price outperforms the $37. Wouldn't you want to know that you can charge $10 more for your ebook?

By implementing split testing into your marketing efforts, you would be amazed at what you can discover. Not only can these principles be used for your existing marketing plan, you can take your discoveries and use them on new projects that you might work on, thus saving time and money in the process.

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