How To Test Websites, Part 1 - Split Testing - Internet Marketing Australia

Testing your website's copy is very important. By tweaking different parts (such as your headline, first paragraph, call to action, etc), you can raise your conversion rate - the percentage of visitors who make a purchase, opt in, or provide any other desired action.

This will mean more results for the same level of traffic.

There are basically two types of testing you can do on your website: split testing or multi-variate. In this part, we will cover split testing. In part 2, we will look at multi-variate testing.

Most internet marketers probably use split testing.

With split testing, you change one part of your web page (for example, the headline) while keeping the rest of the page constant. You then send equal amounts of traffic randomly to each alternative page, and see which headline results in the most conversions.

The advantage of split testing is that it is easy to implement. Just create N number of alternative web pages that are identical except for the part to be tested. Then, on your actual page, use javascript and the rand() function to randomly forward 1/N users to each alternative page.

For example, if you want to test 4 headlines at a time for www.mydomain.com/salespage.html, create pages www.mydomain.com/salespage1.html, www.mydomain.com/salespage2.html, etc. Then have salespage.html redirect 1/4 of your traffic to each alternative page.

The disadvantage to split testing is that you can only test one variable at a time. It might take many months of testing / tweaking parts of your sales page before your page starts to reach its optimal conversion rate. This will result in a lot of missed sales.