Split testing is not a one-moment or a one-day process to come at conclusions. Reviving and renewing your business goals need constant efforts from your side. That means, presenting the best version of your website to the audience should be your ultimate goal to attain conversions through the split test.
Keeping all this in mind, we must first know what is split testing. It might sound like you have to perform long-lasting experiments and must hustle yourself with loads and loads of work.
Well, split testing is the process of creating another copy of the variation of the original version of your website. If that sounds like you, you have to put in a lot of effort and hard work, but it is all worth it in the end.
Read this blog post to know what you need to test, test, and measure. Also, how to maximize your business success through split testing.
Split Testing: Bringing out the best version of your website
What is a Split Test?
Split testing is all about conducting random experiments to test them to develop optimized results and improve the key metrics. In brief, if you want your audience to perform in a certain way, let’s say, you want them to complete a purchase or a sign-up.
Evaluate how your CTA button or sign-up appears to the audience so that they can act upon it. Consequently, you can attain better conversions.
How does the process take place :
Think of a lot of ideas, implement one, and expect good results. Many times you get them, other times you don’t. Keep on experimenting and make a decision. It could be a complicated process, to begin with, but you will get to maximize your revenues in the end.
But there are specific rules of split testing :
You can follow your intuition and prefer what goes with it. Allow split testing to let you give the best results instead of wasting your time in testing a whole lot of random variables.
How can you avoid wasting your Time Through Split Testing
- Make a test plan: First of all, determine what you want to test when you will want to test, and what you are for the test.
- Devise a measuring tool: Run and analyze the results of your split test. You can search for the tools on Google that come with many options and allow you to that are workable.
- Create a hypothesis: Split testing is not a menial task. You must be aware of what you are doing and what results in it will produce. Evaluate whether the data you are producing is giving you enough results.
- Split test one thing at a time: Split testing allows you to create a variable for your control version. You don’t have to test one whole thing against the other. You have to test the minor details such as the CTAs, a headline, an adjective, images, and logos. You can pick up one item to test. Further, you can measure the performance against the control version of the site.
- Test result-oriented things: First of all, you have to test a large sample of random people to look at how people react to your results. You can make out significant answers to your tests, and when you are testing it on a larger sample, it provides you real results.
- Write down the conclusions: Derive the tests’ conclusions and note them down along with the results. Create documentation for the tests and their results. You cannot just split test and make assumptions about their figures in the head.
- Set goals and measurements: Testing is a continuous process. It is not a one-day task. First of all, you have to set goals for what you want to accomplish because you need to evaluate each test to measure success.
For example – if you’re going to enhance your sales, you need to focus on the variables which give you more click through rates. As you cannot improve sales in a flicker of a second, you have to create variables for the elements that can push you through sales.
Note: If your test is not giving you enough results to enhance your sales, you will have to do the testing again.
What are the Elements you Need to Split Test
You can test anything and everything. Why? Because you could easily make out what surprises you might attain through the results. As stated above, you can test everything and anything literally right from a color scheme to a specific word in a sentence.
Below are some of the elements you can split test :
- Calls to action: You must focus on your website’s elements, which enable users to take some action. Your CTA button is the first thing you need to test first. You can test the size, color, position of the CTA. Giving your CTA a particular focus is quite essential so that you can optimize the testing.
- Visuals: Focus on the images on your website as they give a visionary impact on the visitors. Sometimes marketers think that a professional photo will work for their website, but people like casual images usually relate to them. A split test is a perfect solution for you to test what images do people react to.
- Forms: You might be thinking that forms cannot bring customers to your business and allow you to achieve growth. But collecting their information is the first and foremost thing to know what your users’ attributes are. Therefore split test your forms and make sure you optimize the fields’ size and keep them short and informative.
- Emails: Email marketing is the most primitive method of engaging customers. Nowadays, you can send automated emails and keep your customers engaging. Therefore you must split tests to optimize your email campaigns. You can optimize the subject lines, length, the design of the mails, and almost everything that could bring users back to your site. Focus on the CTA button of your email campaigns and test the effectiveness of them through split tests.
How to Achieve a Successful Split Test
First of all, you need to have a firm plan which can cover every testable element, such as the position of your text and pictures, the background theme, headlines, and images.
Once you have created a plan, it will give you astonishing results. Always split tests considering your business goals. Every test needs a lot of measurement, priority, and testing.
You can achieve a successful split test through these steps :
- Track your website performance: Evaluate the website’s performance because, ultimately, your campaigns’ success says a lot about it. Be definite with the measurements while tracking your performance. See how much traffic your site is generating on a weekly or monthly basis.
Remember, if your split test planning is not good enough, your conversions will also be poor. Set a timeframe when you need to measure your performance and see how things are working, are they in your favor or against you. Also, take a look at the google analytic reports and insights.
- Review your business objectives: It is essential to review your goals one more time before splitting the test. You have to ask yourself “why” why you want to split the test.
For example– You want to boost the click-through rates by 25 percent and open rates by 10 percent. These are called measurable objectives.
They help you bridge the gap between the arrival of visitors on the sites to the point you want to attain conversions. Therefore before setting up a plan, take down why you want to achieve a specific objective.
For example – ask yourself why you need email subscribers, now create a loyal audience to improve your sales and expand your business. So, email subscribers are merely the means to enhance the end goal, i.e., sales.
- Focus on actionable metrics: Evaluate what exactly you want to measure. Maybe you measure the pageviews, the unique visitors, and click-through rates, which could give you a little bit of satisfaction. But if you did not record sales, everything went vain. Therefore, focus on the actionable metrics regarding your sales, which could give you dramatic business growth. Access how your efforts are translating and manifesting into reality.
CONCLUSION
Split testing is the need of the hour because you cannot create and assume a marketing campaign. It comes through trial and error. Therefore split test your ideas and experiments to optimize the conversion rates.
