Split Testing Your Landing Pages For Internet Marketing Success

The most basic test method for testing the success of your landing pages is call A-B split testing.  The name comes from the fact that you have two versions of the landing page (A & B) that your traffic is randomly split between.  Based on the conversion rates of each page, you can determine what works best for the offer you are trying to promote.

Parallel running of each page and randomly assigning the visitors is critical to this method of testing.  If the pages aren’t run at the same time then it would be a sequential test and factors such as the time of day or the time of year could skew the results leading you in the wrong direction.

In split testing, version A is normally your original content, or control page.  Version B is a slightly modified version which will test various features of the offer page.  It is vital that only one modification is made to the original version for version B.  If you add more than one variable to the test, there will be no way to know which change caused the results to differ.  This is classic scientific methodology for testing.

It is possible to have more than one variation in your landing page to test, but then you are running an A-B-C test where A is the control page and B and C have one change.  Split tests rarely have more than 10 different versions because the data analysis can get too burdensome.  If you need to test that many versions of your original to find a recipe for success, then perhaps you need to rethink your original page.

A-B Split testing has many advantages including ease of test design, ease of implementation, and ease of analysis.  Because landing pages are your doorway to success it is critical that they have the proper call to action and send the message that makes them convert into sales.  Without this, your internet marketing efforts will not produce enough return on your investment.

The disadvantages of A-B split testing are the limited number of versions you can test, the data collection can be burdensome, and you can not consider variable interactions.  Regardless, successful internet marketing begins with proper testing and A-B split testing can be the cornerstone of your testing efforts that bring you internet marketing success.