Smart marketers know the value of split testing and apply it to all online marketing campaigns. Only by way of proper split testing can you know which headlines, ad copy, keywords and landing pages your audience responds to best. And only through split testing are you going to keep your costs as low as possible. The following is an example online marketing campaign where we are going to show you first-hand how you can save money by split testing.
Save Money by Split Testing – A Quick Example
For our example, we are going to use a simple online ecommerce site selling a range of cooking equipment. In order to show you how split testing will save you money, we’ll outline the site and all the costs that are currently being drained from the site.
First you have hosting and web design fees, but the site is also paying for an ecommerce shopping cart, an email marketing management service and the site also employs pay-per-click marketing in order to drive traffic. The biggest drain on the business is the platform fees that come out of each product sold.
While these may seem like minimal costs, they can grow out of control once the business begins to scale upwards. Your job is to save money by split testing.
Split Testing Landing Pages
From your home page to the page you send traffic from one of your pay-per-click ads – you need to test those landing pages to make sure that your online campaigns are performing optimally. Before you start testing anything, see if you can improve all of your landing pages by decreasing load times and by making them simpler and easier to navigate.
Then, start seeing if split testing will save you money by creating two identical landing pages. Then, you are going to tweak the headline of one and drive identical traffic to both. Which title does your traffic tend to gravitate towards? If you have an answer, you just conducted a successful split test.
Your job is to try to save money by split testing by conducting tests on all of your landing pages and overall marketing materials.
Use Surveys to Your Advantage
Instead of split testing your online marketing materials to death, you could just ask your online audience what they’re looking for. See what colors they prefer, what language, what navigation style – don’t be shy, ask them whatever questions you want the answers to. Then adjust your marketing materials accordingly.
Once you have a solid base of user-preferred content, you can start seeing if split testing will save you money by fine tuning all of your content.
How to Save Money by Split Testing
You may be thinking that targeted headlines and perfected landing pages are great, but how does that translate into fewer costs for an online business? In our example above, by targeting our traffic, headlines, keywords and every other aspect of our online marketing campaigns, we can effectively minimize costs by making them insignificant.
By driving more targeted traffic to your site and by making sure that your online marketing materials are constructed exactly to match the visitor’s preferences, you can drive more sales, more profits and more overall revenue.
Just consider the savings with PPC marketing. When you attempt to save money by split testing with pay-per-click marketing, you do yourself a favor in a number of ways. First of all, your keywords become more targeted, thus decreasing your cost-per-click. When you split-test, you send fewer erroneous clicks your way and thus you also increase your quality score.
And by seeing how split testing will save you money with your targeted landing pages, you’re increasing your quality score even more, which brings your costs-per-click down even lower.
So you see, by driving sales and decreasing costs in lots of little ways, you’ll earn more profit overall. This is the idea behind trying to save money by split testing. Whether you have a small site, a medium sized ecommerce site or you have a large site that is intended to provide services for thousands of visitors, you’ll want to conduct split testing every chance you get.
The good news is that it’s not hard to save money by split-testing. Adwords gives you ample opportunity to create multiple ad groups, allowing you to create several test control groups, and even WordPress allows you to create landing page after landing page to your heart’s content. With all of these online tools and the drive to succeed, you’ll soon see the light as to how split testing will save you money.
