Friday, October 7, 2011

On How Split Testing Can Improve Your Conversion Rate

In every successful business, testing has always played an important part in the whole process. We can never really guess what exact factors on our marketing or advertising will draw in more traffic especially in online businesses. This is where split testing comes in.

Most, if not all, successful online or web-based businesses employ testing to determine the right factors or combination that will enhance or improve the conversion rate of their website or webpage. This will help them make the right decisions and will ensure they will get the best value out of their investment. They will not spend time and money on parts or factors of the business, advertisements, or marketing strategies that will not deliver the results that they want.

AB Split testing, when done properly, can double the conversion rate of your website or webpage which in turn means more profit for you. Right advertising will draw more traffic to your site and may be your only way to compete against large competitors that had already established their names in the business where you are currently in.

What exactly is split testing? It is a marketing or advertising strategy where you are splitting your web traffic into two equal volumes and sending them to two different versions of your page or site. You are testing an alternate page against your original page and checking which one would draw more visitors or traffic after a period of time you set.

The disadvantage of this kind of testing is that you can only test one factor at the same time so you will not really know if it will work better in combination with other factors or not. It is also time consuming because you need to determine that the difference will be significant through mathematical computations before you can determine that it has a real effect on your advertising or marketing. Factors or variables are tested one at a time and you cannot have them in interactions or combinations.

Split testing is your way to ensure that your are continually making improvements based on tested results and not just guessing what to change or alter in your current version of the page or site.
With split testing you know what really works best and are able to make all the necessary changes. Without it, you may be losing the money you should have profited and may be doing just guesswork.

Trey is the owner of http://www.fliptracker.com/ and the guy behind the Iphone App System