5 Questions A Digital Marketing Consultant Asks Before Split Testing

Split testing can be a bit intimidating before you start, but there are a scary amount of digital marketing specialists who get itchy trigger fingers and can’t help themselves from split testing themselves into a corner. There are five questions that our digital marketing consultancy team always encourage marketers to ask before committing to any split testing - make a note of these for future use.

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Is my page fully functional and doing what I want it to?

Okay, so you might think that this is obvious. But you would be surprised by the amount of marketers that find out their call to action doesn’t lead anywhere or their headline still has spelling mistakes after they’ve launched their campaign. Before you do anything, you want the page to be polished to perfection and ripe for the picking. That means checking every link, viewing on various sized screens and devices, rereading the text - we mean it, comb through everything.

Is my page easy on the eyes?

Your landing page is there to take your audience one step closer to converting to a sale. It’s not there to bombard them with every inch of information that you can fit - with that in mind, how cluttered or distracting is the page? For example, if your page is aimed towards expanding your email database and gaining subscribers, are there too many links and add-ons that could be detracting from your overall aim?

You can include additional information about the offers you might be promoting, or other relevant content, but your landing page should all be focused towards guiding the user from the landing page to your call to action, and into the next step.

Do I really need to test it?

If you’re still growing your customer base and you’re yet to see swathes of online traffic, or you’re split testing a landing page offering one of your less sought-after products, split testing will probably not yield you very valuable findings just yet. The returns simply aren’t there to make it a worthwhile investment of your time - instead, wait until your traffic grows or split test a product with a large amount of interest. Split testing is about learning how your consumer reacts to your advertising and content, so the point is to cast the widest net with the most important pages that gather the most interest.

Have I got the recipe right?

You’ve got to make sure that you don’t have too much or not enough!

Remember to include:

A bonus/offer oriented headline and sub-heading
Social proof or testimonials
A strong call to action
A short, simple form for users to complete
Contact information to your customer service team
Content, such as videos or images, that break up the text and convey your overall message

Try to avoid:

Outbound links that can distract your user from converting
Content that could distract your user from converting
Irrelevant offers that could distract your user from converting
ANYTHING THAT COULD DISTRACT YOUR USER FROM CONVERTING

What do I want to test?

You might be eager to start split testing, but do you know what you should test? You can play around with plenty of aspects, but try to zero in on the parts that you might see a marked improvement with. For example, toy around with the headline or call to action - this is where your conversions start, and if you can make it any more welcoming than it was all worth it. If you’re split testing on an established website, look around for the corners where you’re having problems or low efficacy. It might take some small tweaks but eventually you’ll get the balance just right, and a poorly performing page might be able to redeem itself.

Choose a limited amount of factors to test at once, so you know where to attribute any good or bad results you might get. For example, if you swap the headline font and the call to action button colour, you might get an increase or decrease in conversions - or it may even stay the same. How do you know which is contributing to the increase or decrease? Or if the conversions stay constant you may have made a negative and positive adjustment that are cancelling each other out.

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Split-testing is a great way to understand your audience, so you can learn how to give them the offers that they are most likely to respond to. Dilate Digital is a Perth digital marketing consultancy,