It’s almost impossible to get kids to eat. When you ask them what they want, they will promptly respond that they don’t know. However, when you give them something to eat, they will be quick to refuse that too!
Fortunately, if you give the kid a choice, the chances are high that the kid will finally choose something he or she prefers. In this way, you can understand what the kid likes the most and become an instant favorite by giving the kid exactly what he or she wants.
Similarly, in digital marketing, users hardly ever know what they want unless the marketer offers them a choice. This situation is where the process of split testing comes in.
What Is Traffic Split Testing?
The objective of split testing is to vary the input and observe the changes in the output. In the context of digital marketing, traffic split testing is to change various parts of the marketing campaign like blog posts, ads, or emails to see if the traffic flow increases or decreases.
Depending on the results, you can make either small or more significant changes to the campaign. Ideally, the original (the current version) is tested against one with just a single change to get more objective results.
Why Is It Required?
On the one hand, split testing is required to boost the revenue of your company. While there are several objectives that you may have with your digital marketing campaign, in the end, it all comes down to selling more of your product or service.
If you want to sell more, you will either need to increase your conversion rates or reach more people through advertising. To accomplish any of them, you need to find out what people want and what works for them.
This situation is where split testing comes in handy. By running multiple tests (either simultaneously or individually), you will be able to fine-tune your marketing campaign to suit the tastes of your demographic.
You will be able to provide them with the exact information they need, that is wrapped in an attractive advertisement to catch their eye. Doing this will ultimately increase your conversion rates and drive your sales up.
Split Testing Examples
Now, while you are selling a product or a service, there are thousands of elements that are involved. You can conduct split testing on any of these elements. Listed below are some of the places where you can try split testing.
Advertisements
The most common place to try split testing would be with your ads. Ads usually fall somewhere higher up in the sales funnel when you want to reach as many people as possible and get them to your site.
In an advertisement, you can change many things. For example, you can change the entire format of the ad from an image to a video. Thus you can try a video with one image, two images or even two videos.
Diving deeper into these, you can also alter the background images or the soundtrack that is used in the video and various such aspects to see which works better.
Similarly, there are several other aspects of the advertisement that you can vary to increase your conversion rates and get more visitors to your desired site.
Emails
Another effective way of marketing is to use emails. While advertisements were towards the upper end of the sales funnel, emails are towards the lower end depending on how you use them. You can use them for retargeting purposes or even to maintain relations with customers who have already purchased the product.
When it comes to emails, you can change fewer things than an advertisement. You could change the content of the emails – whether it is an offer, feedback, service reminders or something else. You could play around with the email subject line, the amount of content in the email and even the frequency at which you are sending them.
Sometimes, varying just one feature may not be enough to bring about significant changes. That is when you try different combinations with other aspects. Often a whole new idea is required to create a substantial boost in traffic.
Blogs
Blogs can be a useful tool when used correctly. Depending on how you structure them, you can use them just about anywhere in the sales funnel. You could use them for SEO to direct initial traffic to your website, or you could use them to influence your customer’s decision-making process with a post on how you are superior compared to your competitors.
While there isn’t much to play around with a blog, you can still influence the customer in a few powerful ways. The call to action is one of the best examples. After delivering the information to your readers, your call to action can convert them into a buyer.
You could also improve conversion rates (people clicking on the posts in this instance) by using more attractive blog titles which arouse curiosity.
Offers
You can try split testing offers too. They come at the purchasing end of the sales funnel.
You could try varying the amount of discount that you offer to customers, or you could also change the type of discount that you are offering. For example, you could see if free shipping compared to a 15% discount makes a difference or if increasing the discount gets you more sales. You can also offer a lower discount with free shipping.
Web Pages
Finally, one of the biggest things that you can change is how you design your webpage, especially the landing pages. This change can play a huge role in how the visitors interact with your website.
You should design everything on the web page in such a way that information is made readily available to the user. Moreover, the user should be able to navigate quickly and make the purchase quickly without wasting too much time.
A professional team will be able to optimize the design of your website using heat maps of where the user clicked the most or held the cursor for the longest duration.
There are infinite factors of a website that you can split test before you come up with the perfect product. However, the important thing is to do it correctly.
Common Split Testing Mistakes
Once someone learns how to split test, he or she try and conduct a few experiments on his or her own. However, they often make mistakes while performing the tests and thus end up with incorrect results and won’t lead to an increase in the traffic.
We have identified some of the most common mistakes made by amateurs in the field and listed them below.
Varying Multiple Aspects
While split testing, one can vary multiple aspects. However, the key to split testing successfully is to change just one element at a time. A common mistake performed by amateurs is that they split test multiple factors together.
There are two problems with this. One is that the complexity of the test increases with every additional element that you decide to test. With the addition of every new element, the number of cases rises exponentially making it harder to conclude.
The other problem is that you will need a lot of time and an unusually high number of readings to analyze the data you have objectively.
If you split test multiple factors for a short time, your results will be questionable, and thus you will be making emotional decisions on which variant to use. Choosing the wrong variant will then not only lead to no (or a negative) change in your traffic, it will have also wasted a lot of your time.
Thus, it is important to split test only one component at a time. If you want to hurry up the process, you could hire professionals who will identify essential elements that you need to test to get definitive results.
Concentrating On Smaller Things
While it is true that changing any element of your marketing campaign might lead to an increase in conversion, this does not mean that you should try modifying every element.
If you try doing this, you will be wasting a lot of time and resources on elements that may not give you any sizeable returns. You could spend this same time on other factors that might make more of a difference.
For example, if you see that changing some small elements like the background color or the text for the buy button isn’t making a difference, you should consider reworking the entire advertisement or web page rather than spending time on other small elements of them.
Split Testing the Audience
Often, marketers try and split test the audience as well as trying to see if their services are preferred by a different demographic than the one intended. However, while doing so, they find it hard to distinguish between the demographics.
The first and foremost thing to check is to see if the audience is distinct enough. In the case of photography, people following photographers on Instagram may be photographers themselves (potential customers if you are selling camera equipment).
On the other hand, they might be people interested in viewing pretty pictures. It would be hard to differentiate between the two if you source your audience from a place like this. Thus you need to ensure that it is easy to tell your audience apart.
Once you have differentiated the audience, it is imperative to know which characteristic of the audience drove them into buying. For example, people following photography blogs might be doing so for the art aspect of it.
However, people following photography equipment blogs are more interested in how the equipment works and improving their trade with better parts. These people are more likely to purchase from you since they are already in the profession.
Not Tracking the Traffic
One of the most important things to remember while split testing is to track your users through the entire sales funnel. An amateur marketer may be tracking users only towards the bottom end of the funnel. What this does is reduces the efficiency of the whole process.
After completing your split testing, you can optimize your sales by implementing the model at every step of the funnel.
Another significant advantage is that you can track the route that a user takes to come to your landing page through various websites and web pages. You can then split test this route as well to make it easier for the customer to buy from you.
However, this is not as easy as directly taking your customer to the checkout page. Professionals can set the exact number of steps that the customer will have to go through to ensure that they purchase when they finally reach that site.
Wrapping It Up
As you can see from the above examples, hiring a professional digital marketer will ensure that you do not make such simple mistakes along the way. Moreover, they will help you split test all the essential variables in the least amount of time possible.
Remember, every minute you spend split testing an incorrect model is a minute that you could have spent making more money with the right one. If you want to ensure that you have an experienced and qualified marketing team to handle your split testing for you, then click here to book an appointment with us. Let’s work together to take your business to the next level.
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