Landing Page Tester: What is a Split Test and How Does it Run?

With all of today’s modern tools and communication channels, running a successful marketing campaign can require more analytical skills than creative expertise. 

Testing has become a way of life for marketers, but it can be tricky to get right. Wouldn’t it be great if brands could use a proven landing page tester and overall testing strategy so they can better measure the results of individual campaigns? 

Believe it or not, there’s a simple way to accurately test your campaign without needing to put a lot of time and energy into it. Running a simple split test can help you learn a lot about campaign performance.

Are you curious about how a split test can help you achieve your marketing goals? It’s time to learn about split tests, how they can benefit your company, and the best ways to run them. 

What is Split Testing?

Split testing (also known as A/B testing) gives marketers the ability to compare the performance of different versions of a web page, app, or ad. There’s a “control” version of the ad, which is usually the original version, and a different version of the control material that’s altered in some way. 

Marketers and advertisers like to use split testing because it can work for almost any element of an ad, app landing page, or other content you’re interested in learning more about. The sky’s the limit when you’re A/B testing, but these are the most popular elements people tend to test:

– Headlines

– Calls-to-Action (CTA)

– Subject lines

– Target keywords

– Imagery

– Layout

– Fonts

– Colors

– Messaging

– Tone

Why Markets Love Split Testing

There are a variety of benefits that come with split testing certain elements of marketing and advertising campaigns.

We could write an entire series of blog posts on the specific benefits of split testing. Instead, we’re going to focus on a few things that matter the most to us. 

Improve Content

Simply producing content to put in front of your audience isn’t enough. If the content can’t keep their attention, you’ll be putting a lot of time and effort into marketing work that won’t give you results. 

Content has become such an important part of the marketing world. You don’t want to put any extra time or money into content that doesn’t work for you, and split testing can help give you definitive proof that certain things work.

Once you take the time to understand what resonates with your audience, you can make iterative updates to the most important elements of your digital marketing experience. 

Improve User Engagement

User engagement is often tightly tied to overall profitability and success. The attention of your users isn’t just an important resource, it’s also finite and difficult to grab when you’re competing for their time and attention. 

When your users spend time engaging with your brand on different platforms, it shows that they find value in your content. That value can translate to money from products, services, subscriptions, or sales. Highly engaged users aren’t just more likely to buy your products or services, they’re also more likely to tell their friends, family, and colleagues about your business. 

When your content is improved, you’ll often see that user engagement tends to improve with it. Marketers and advertisers that are concerned with engagement will often do several A/B tests in order to pinpoint what needs to be done to better the user experience. 

Easily Understandable Results

Marketing metrics can be very difficult to understand if you don’t work in the industry. There are so many different metrics to measure and understand, and sorting through all of the data to glean insights from it can be a challenge. 

Split testing can give you the insight you need without having to complicate your findings. Certain tools and services have made it even easier for you to determine what tests perform the best and can even suggest more tests to run for even better results in the future. 

Instead of having to endlessly analyze data to see what performs, you’ll just have one element that you’re testing with straight forward results. The ad with the most clicks because of a different image is a clear winner. Users that engaged with your app more after you changed the color scheme clearly prefer the changes you made.

Save Time and Money

When you don’t perform split testing, making changes to certain parts of your ad campaign can make you feel like you’re throwing things to a wall and seeing what sticks. 

You may spend hours working with your design department on new images, only to find that all of your work didn’t make a difference. Your team may spend months working on a new website and then find that making a small change could have been much more effective. 

You’re not just losing time when you and your employees pour energy into making changes, you’re also losing money. All of the time you spend making changes to campaigns could have been time devoted to client work. 

Split testing is an effective way to make changes without having to invest a lot in your work. Instead of focusing on huge changes to your overall project, you can make iterative updates to your work so you can pinpoint what changes need to be made. 

Reduce Risk

Making a big change to a campaign, website, or digital experience involves a lot of risks. You risk putting company resources into something that may not work. It’s even possible that a dramatic enough change could lose you customers or clients. 

The beauty of split testing is that when it’s done right, you only focus on making small changes. Instead of revamping your entire website, you can simply see if changing content or adding images helps.

Split testing also gives you helpful insights into customer behavior and preferences. Once you know more about what they like, you’ll be able to make changes that resonate with them the most. 

How to Run an Effective Split Test

Now that you know about all of the benefits split testing has, you’ll be eager to work on doing a split test of your own.

Split tests can be powerful, but only if they’re set up right from the beginning. Doing the wrong thing could give you junk data or cause you to make the wrong assumptions.

If you’re ready to run a split test on your own, make sure that you follow these important tips to ensure that you get the best results.

Identify Your Goal

We know that you’re going to glean a lot of insights from the tests you perform, but it’s still a good idea to pick a metric to focus on before you run your test. What you choose will affect your dependent variable and give you deeper insight into what you need to learn. 

Some marketers like to start out by forming a hypothesis, much like the scientific method you learned in middle school Science class. You may hypothesize that changing the first image customers see on your product page could improve user engagement. Someone on your team may think that switching out CTAs could increase your conversion rate. 

If you make the mistake of waiting until the test is running to determine your goals and what metrics matter the most to you, it’s highly possible that you won’t be able to set up the test the right way to get the results you need. 

Test One Variable at a Time

When you know that there are a lot of things you can test during your campaign, it might be tempting to test several things at a time. However, you’ll be able to get better results if you only focus on testing one thing.

Remember, split testing is supposed to be a simple way for you to test certain elements. When you test too many things at a time, it can be much harder to understand your results. 

Your hypothesis was that changing certain elements of your landing page would increase engagement. If you use a different CTA in the copy and keep everything else the same, it’ll be easy to see if a certain tweak to language works.

Let’s say that instead of simply changing the CTA, you also used different images on the site, different header text, and added in a video to see how people react. If visit times increase and you notice more engagement from your visitors, it’ll be very difficult to tell which change made the most impact. 

One of the best things about split testing is that they can be done relatively quickly. You’ll still have the ability to test out as many things as you want, but you’ll be better off spacing those tests out and narrowing your focus. 

Vary Your Audience Focus

It’s a good idea to hyper-focus on one element for the variable you’re testing, but you should consider conducting the test with different audiences to get better results. 

This method works better when you have more control over the audience like with an email marketing campaign. Testing with two or more audiences that are equal can give you more conclusive results. 

If you’re not sure how to divide up your audience, or which audiences you should be testing, the right split testing tool can help you out. They can suggest audiences, create lookalike audiences, and help automate the process overall. 

Find a Good Landing Page Tester

Once you get the hang of making split tests for landing pages, you may want to start running more tests. While we don’t recommend testing different elements on the same page, you can run multiple tests if you’re working with different audiences and can control what they see.

Running all of this on your own can be difficult. That’s why we recommend finding a great landing page tester program. Having the right tools can make it easy to run certain tests and measure results. 

There’s also nothing wrong with getting a little outside help when you start testing. Getting insight from industry leaders can give you the insight you need to run a successful campaign. Talk to specialists to learn the best next steps for your testing to take. 

Be Patient to See Results

We did say earlier that split tests are great for marketers and advertisers because it allows them to gather data and make decisions relatively quickly. A/B testing certain site elements can take much less time than doing a complete website overhaul, but it’ll still take some time to produce results. 

There’s no one perfect test length to adhere to, that’ll depend on what you’re trying to test. Certain tests could see results in a matter of hours, others can take a few days or even weeks before you can get any meaningful data. 

You may want to make quick changes to your landing pages, ads, and other marketing collateral, but cutting off a test too early could make you take away the wrong things from the data you collect. 

Be patient when you’re running your tests. Check-in on the data you’re collecting periodically and give yourself plenty of time before you make any drastic changes.

Improve Your Marketing Today

Once you master the art of split testing, there’s no telling what you can do to improve your marketing. After you determine what you want to test, get a great landing page tester, and let things run their course, you’ll have enough data to make effective changes. 

Split testing is only one thing you can do to improve your marketing strategy. There’s plenty you can do to revamp your marketing efforts or build an entirely new strategy from scratch.

Regardless of what the next steps you want to take in marketing are, we want to help. Fill out our form to request a digital marketing review so we can start working on the best way to improve your marketing strategy.