Split Testing And Beyond

Internet marketers new to the business are initially more than happy to simply drive traffic to what they have on offer. Needless to say, before long they become conscious of the fact that the conversion rate is much more of an important measure, even more so if they are paying for the directed traffic. If sales do not materialize some may give up completely, but others start to appreciate the need for testing and do something about it.

Split testing is one of the most powerful forms of testing and it lets you make comparisons between different parts of your campaign. The most straightforward is A/B testing. This is when separate factors such as say, for example, two advertisements, two headlines, or two landing pages are compared to one another. Some systems have this facility for split testing already built in. If you happen to be advertising by use of Google Adwords, the procedure to compare the click through and conversion rates of different advertisements is quite simple.

Following a number of clicks it becomes apparent which advertisement is performing better than the others. The not so successful ad then gets put out of use and another one replaces it and the test process starts all over again. When this form of testing is repeated over and over again the end result will be an advertisement which generates both more clicks as well as sales. The marketers with more experience use split testing techniques like Taguchi testing which compare more than one variable at any given time.

Those marketers who know what they are doing would say that split testing is the obvious way forward. However, it's not the only kind of testing which will develop the bottom line. Advertisers on pay per click are able to make use of hundreds and thousands of keywords for their campaign and quite often these keywords will give a good return on the investments made. However, many of them can be a drain on the budget as whilst attracting clicks they do not necessary produce sales.

This can make the difference between a campaign being a super success or a disappointing failure and is usually the point when the new marketer withdraws from the campaign as it is becoming too expensive. If only they knew, if they were to track the conversion rate of individual keywords, the business could quite easily turn into a nice little earner.

Another way of looking at is to take into account how much time the visitor actually spends on the site for each individual keyword. This provides information in connection with the AIDA principle, which proposes that likely customers go through stages of Attention, Interest, Desire, and finally Action. In theory the longer a visitor continues to read a sales page, the further along the AIDA process they are. The keywords which keep the visitor on the landing page for a longer time are more than likely to be winners. When using this procedure, keywords which are not performing so well can be identified without the necessity of spending a fortune whilst waiting for a big number of actions such as sales to take place.

Marketers using testing and doing it in the right way are much more likely to achieve financial success especially when they are implementing other analysis strategies as a means of making their decisions.

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