Split Testing – Why Split Testing Is A Must

Why Split Testing?

Many people wonder why split testing is such a big thing. Once you create your winning copy and graphics, it should work out of the box, right?

Right.

The thing is simple actually – no copy or sales page is ever perfect. Never. Nope. There’s always place to improve.

What seems to have a great click-through rate, optin rate or whatever, could work even better if you put in a little work.

What is Split Testing?

Simply put, it’s basically optimizing your sales page (or optin page or whatever you’re using) with one simple goal, and that is increasing the overall click through rates. Why? Because simply put the more people clicks your links, the more sales you will make. It’s directly affecting the amount of money or the number of subscribers you will squeeze out of the landing page without adding costs to advertising.

Numbers don’t lie

Picture it this way. All numbers are made up, by the way, just as an illustration.

You create a beautiful landing page where you invite people to join your mailing list, offering a certain incentive to them. This could be a bonus report, a software title, a tool, anything. Then you start publishing your link to social media, maybe even start an advertising campaign on Facebook or Google, and watch the results.

End of the week, you count 100 visitors to your landing page, out of which you got 10 clicks to your affiliate links, and make 1 sale, bringing you $20 in commissions. Because you’ve spent about $20 for advertising, you’ve somehow covered your costs and you have one new subscriber (or buyer) on your list. Great. The actual conversion rate is at 1%, because 1 out of 100 visitors took action.

Now, this is nice, but it won’t replace your job anytime soon. Plus, you can’t really be sure it will happen every day, because the average will only be possible to calculate after a number of days. So how can you scale up to the positive numbers that will help you survive?

Scaling up your online income

There are different ways you can scale up. The most obvious one is to increase the number of visitors.

This is called traffic, and there’s an abundance of sources where you can learn about it. By the way, one of the most effective way is to join a free membership like Master Affiliate Profits, where you’ll learn many things about traffic FOR FREE. Take a look.

Increasing traffic to your landing page can be done in two major ways:

• Free traffic: posting, blogging, publishing on social media.
• Paid traffic: advertising on Facebook, Google etc.

The first option works, but it’s slow; Google can take months to index all your pages, and even then only if you have used the proper SEO optimization techniques. On the other hand, once the traffic starts, it will flow forever (if only….) or at least for some time to come.

The second option, which means paying for ads on platforms like Facebook and Google, is very fast. You can expect traffic to start almost immediately. But, it costs money. And if your landing page is actually not so perfect, you could burn hundreds before any real results come your way.

So both methods will cost you – for one you pay with your time, for one you pay with money. Depending on which one you have more, you’ll choose one – or even both – that will work for you best.

Easy math says that if you work twice as hard (post twice the number of posts, for instance), you should get twice the visitors. Could work, but not always. You’ll probably be closer to some 75% increase, provided you stick with the SEO techniques that work. Google just takes lots of time (sigh).

On the other hand, with paid advertising, you’ll get closer to doubling your visitors numbers, but for double the money.

Scaling up using Split Testing

If you follow the above, you’ll pay $40 for the next ad and get 2 sales, right? Still, you’re on zero profits. Actually, no matter how many dollars you put in, you’ll get the same out in our particular made-up case. So what’s the point?!?

There’s only one obvious answer, and that is

You have to increase your conversion rates.

What is Conversion Rate?

A conversion rate is the number of sales, let’s say results, divided by the total number of visitors. In our case, if you divide 1 sale (= result) with 100 visitors, the conversion rate is 1%. And as you saw, it’s not enough to bring any profits in.

Imegine if you could reach conversion rates of 5%, for instance; in such a case, your $20 investment would bring back 5 sales, totaling to $100 and a profit of $80. Now that’s different, right? But how do you do that?

By testing different versions of your landing page. And this is called Split Testing (or A/B testing).

How does split testing work?

As mentioned above, there’s no perfect landing page – there’s always place to improve. So maybe just by changing a title you could already increase the overall conversion rate, because it would simply resonate better with the visitors and make it more likely for them to click.

To achieve this, the logical way is to have two (or even more) versions of your landing page, both live in the same time. Then, using a tool (a plugin, a SAAS, whatever) you have to split the incoming traffic in order for both to get a portion of it. After a certain time (or a number of visits), you will see a difference in conversion rates between the landing pages. You’ll want to keep the better one, copy it, change another little thing on it (like maybe a call to action), and repeat the test.

This describes the basic process, and it’s rather simple. But the devil is hidden in the details, and right here the details are how to automate this process. Because doing it by hand, no matter how achievable it is, will take you so much time that you’ll probably stop much too soon and be satisfied with low conversion rates.

This is where specific split testing somftware comes in place, and one of the easiest I’ve found so far is Split Test Monkey.

Don’t misunderstand me, all popular funnel builders (like ClickFunnels, Convertri or Groove) have this functionality built in, but they can cost anything from $90 to $290 per month. If you’re just starting up and using WordPress (like me), you’ll want an alternative.

Split Test Monkey

Split Test Monkey is a relatively simple tool that lets you automate the process of testing. It does so by following the most important metrics, like visits and clicks, to your site. All you need is an option to include short and simple snippets of code to your pages – Split Test Monkey gives them to you, and in WordPress it’s easy to include them where needed.

So you create a landing page, include a code snippet that Split Test Monkey provides, then copy it and change a little something on the copy. Then, include another code snippet on this second page and you’re done. Split Test Monkey will now count visitors and clicks and calculate the metics you need to know in order to decide for the winning version of the page.

Even better, it can automatically decide after a certain time or number of visits and pick the winner by itself, so you don’t have to do anything other than create another test in order to improve further.

Kinda like magic, but magic has nothing to do with it.

The results of Split Testing

The process takes some time – better said, it takes a certain number of visits for the results to be meaningful. If you only send 10 visitors, it will not tell you enough to decide, you’ll have to do a few hundred at least. The magic will reveal itself.

Following our example, if you only manage to improve your conversion rates by 100%, that would mean 2 visitors out of 100 would convert (buy or opt in). This immediately brings you into profit area, because you’ll get $40 for the investment of $20. If you repeat the Split Testing process, you can get better and better, possibly increasing your initial conversion rates many times.

Another example

Typically, an average well-crafted optin page will have conversion rates around 25%. That means for every 100 visits, you’ll get 25 subscribers that you will market to in the next months. If you manage an average 4% conversion rate with your email campaigns, which is good, that calculates to roughly 1 sale out of this 100 visits, or a 1% final conversion rate.

Please note: email marketing rules are a bit different than stated here, but let’s leave it like this for the sake of simplicity.

What happens if you increase the optin rates by a 100%?

That would mean you get 50 subscribers out of 100 visits, and your sales will increase to 2, literally doubling your income.

And the most impressive thing?

This all happens because of a small change in the wording of a title, call to action, or change of button color.

All you need to do is find the best possible combination of those factors, and Split Test Monkey will help you easily do that.

The general rule #1: Always Split Test!

As a rule, you should always split test your landing pages. No matter how beautiful they seem to you, people that visit them will decide in the end. And yes, you can actually double your profits by following a few simple rules.

The general rule #2: Use Software To Split Test!

You can do all the split testing you need totally by hand, it’s a completely viable method. But you know what? Nobody does that. It simply takes too much time and effort, and in the end, you have started your business to work less, not more.

Split Test Monkey

is one of the simplest split testing softwares out there, and it works perfectly for anyone that does not have access to expensive funnel builders like ClickFunnels, Convertri, Groove or others. All you need is a WordPress site, even pure HTML pages will do, and you’re in business.

Have a look at the Split Test Monkey demo on their sales page and you will learn more about the ways to easily improve your sales results.

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