Easy Split Testing On Your Website's Call To Action
by Nicholas Gilbert
Bottom line, if you are not split testing you are losing out on
orders. As you know, when testing the headline of a newspaper ad
one headline can often out pull another as much as 17 times. This
same rule applies to the web. Split testing is one of the first things I implement with my internet marketing consulting clients
Everything on your site is either going to add or subtract, to or
from your conversions. From the opening sentence to the headline,
from the product image to the call to action, from the colors to font
size and type, from the testimonials to the navigation. In order
to make sure each area is 100% as good as it can be you need to split
test.
The way the big name internet marketing pros split test is they have load balancers sending
traffic to their site to different servers and if you have a
multimillion dollar data center and a team of system admins and
programmers staffed around the clock this is the way to go.
However if you don't this article is for you. We will describe
how to do this with your current $10 hosting plan.
Now its not practical and often not profitable to just upload a
second version of your page, the impressions and click through will be
hard to keep track of and if you currently have your control up and
replace it with a page that performs worse and that page is up 100% of
the time, that's going to affect your profit.
The solution, get your web page to dynamically rotate the item you
want to test, and have the results easily accessible. This may
sound hard, it isn't. Simply insert a piece of code, which I will
give you below, into your web page, wait for some stats to build, then
go to your regular web stats software and look for the data.
Let's say you want to test your call to action. Right now you have:
[Product Description & Photo]
Sale Buy Now
and your new call to action is going to
be
Overstock Sale 15% Off Order Now
Lets go over the code, lets say the page is
named product.html, right now your HTML code will look like:
[Product Description & Photo]<br>
<a href="addtocart.php">Sale Buy Now</a>
Now first, rename product.html to product.php* and change any links you
have going to product.html, second you have make two pages to compare,
copy addtocart.php twice, call one addtocart1.php
and the other addtocart2.php, you're not changing anything in that file
you are just going to compare the number of hits each one got.
Now you're going to replace the section of HTML
code above with the following:
[Product Description & Photo]<br>
<?php
$num = rand(1,2);
if($num == 1){
echo "<a href=\"addtocart1.php\">Sale
Buy Now</a>";
}
if($num == 2){
echo "<a href=\"addtocart2.php\">Overstock
Sale 15% Off Order Now</a>";
}
?>
The split testing code is in place, now wait for
some stats to build up. You generally want at least 50 hits total.
Check your stats program, find the number of hits for addtocart1.php and
the number of hits for addtocart2.php, since the link to each page was
being displayed at random the call to action going to the page with the
most hits is your control.
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