Making a Killer Landing Page Through Split Testing

Do you ever wonder what others think about your landing page? Better yet, is your landing page working for you? Understanding the effectiveness of your home page can be accomplished by a technique known as Split Testing. And conducting a test of this sort can help increase your conversion rate and your bottom-line.

A/B Split Test: Application and Measurement

There are various options when it comes to conducting a Split Test on your landing page. A common approach is the A/B split test. When conducting an A/B split test, you have two different versions of your web site – Landing Page A and Landing Page B.

The effectiveness and success of either of the page is based on certain measures/actions. These may include traffic, sales, subscribers, and CPC campaigns depending on your niche and industry. Software, such as Google’s website optimizer, helps perform the testing measures, executing the back-end work of gathering data.

With two versions of your site, which may have different headlines, graphics, text, colors and positioning of advertisements, you are ready to test the two pages. But before this, consider the “barometer” in comparing the two sites. For instance, are you looking at the number of subscribers that sign up on the site as a measurement to test a site’s effectiveness? Or are you specifically looking at the differences in sales from each landing page?

Determining your Page Winner

Undoubtedly, if site B yields better sales than site A, then you have a clear winner. But how and when do you determine the winner? As a rule of thumb, you are comparing the two sites based on combined sales of 30. If Page A resulted in 20 sales and Page B generated 10 sales, Page A is the clear winner of this test. .

But it doesn’t stop there. You will want to continue the testing process to make your winning page even more effective. Remember, you had 10 sales produced by Page B. Therefore, some aspects and features of the site were relatively effective. As a result, you can test different elements from Page B on Page A – text, graphics, positioning of advertisements, colors, etc.

By doing this, testing a feature from Page B on Page A, you either (a) increase sales OR (b) decrease sales. If the new added feature increases sales on Page A, it’s a keeper! However, if it decreases sales, you can go back to the original content of the Page.

You can apply this tactic to all of the elements you want tested – colors, layout, text, graphics, etc. You’ll know what works and what doesn’t. You can come up with the most effective landing page with improved performance yielding higher conversions in less than 2 weeks.

Additional Resources for A/B Testing

If you are looking to implement the A/B split testing to your website, check out the article on “Improving Conversions by Split Testing” on Internet Marketing University. It provides a step-by-step guide on split testing accompanied by great examples. In addition, the author provides links to great resources on several different sites including tutorials along the way. A killer landing page is only a step away! Get started today.