The Little Black Book of Online Business: 1001 Insider Resources Every Business Owner Needs

Chapter 70. Split Testing Services/Software

To realize the maximum possible response rate to your advertisements and sales pages, their various components should be tested on a continual basis. Some of the things you should test include:

Offer (what customers get for their money)

Price and payment options

Headlines (including super- and subheadlines)

Body copy

Fonts used in the headlines and body copy

Background page color

Header image—including using no header at all

Different graphics and different captions for them

Subject lines in e-mails

"From" header in e-mails

Text or HTML e-mail

Long or short copy

Inclusion or exclusion of audio or video

Layout of the page

The simplest way to test the effectiveness of each of these elements is to perform a series of A/B split tests, which work in the following manner: You direct incoming traffic to two different pages that are identical except for the single thing you're testing. After you get a statistically valid number of conversions (30 to 50) from each page, you pick the winner.

Once you have a winner, you use the winning page as the control and set up another page to test some other change. Then go back to step 1 and repeat.

These software packages will manage the split testing for you:

http://www.splitanalyzer.com/

http://www.splittestaccelerator.com/free_mvt_course.php

http://www.l-space-design.com/Products/Conversion_Booster.aspx

The problem with the traditional A/B split test is that it's serial in nature—you test one thing at a time and wait ...