PPC Marketing Secrets 1

Split Testing, A/B Testing or What’s It Called…

Split testing is as important for a PPC marketer as keyword research.

Instead of spending a week waiting for results and then changing something to see if it gets an increase in sales, you make all the possible variations in advance, so by the end of the week you know which combo is performing better, and ditch the losers!

You can split test everything, and you really should. Ad copy, landing page design and affiliate offers those are the things you should start split testing as soon as you launch your campaign.

What are we testing for?

The goal of the split test can vary. Affiliate offers are rather straight forward – you test for which one is converting better.

With ad copy and landing page design you can test for which one converts better into clicks, or you can test which one converts better into sales. In general, you should concentrate on ad CTR, because you want it to be as high as possible for a high quality score, and on LP CTR because you want to drive that traffic to the offers.

Later as you zero in on the best CTR combination, you will move to testing which one sells the most.

LP Playground

Split testing landing pages is fascinating and interesting. You can test different sales copy, different background colors, different images, and every single change would have an influence on the goal! It’s amazing.

As I already said above, it’s a bad idea to start with only one landing page design and scratch your head at the end of the week because you discovered you had only 14% CTR… Having two or more variations would show you the winner straight away.

Don’t stop after you have your winner though. Create more variations to see if they would outperform the winner!

How to…

Ad copy is simple. Create two ads per adgroup and set them to be shown evenly (not optimized). That way at the end of the day / week, whenever you reach enough clicks to be enough to draw statistical conclusions, you see which one is the worst CTR performer and rewrite it to be like the winner, with a change. That way you will end with a high performer ad after a few rounds.

Offers are also simple. If you use Tracking202 or Prosper202, there’s a built in offer rotation functionality. Otherwise, there are a lot of free PHP scripts available that will rotate the affiliate links on you page. After you have enough sales, you check which one converted at the highest rate.

For testing landing pages I use Google’s Website Optimizer. It offers a/b testing and multivariate testing. What you do is create an experiment where you define the two (or more) versions of the page that you want to test and plant a little script on each one. A goal page is required – a page where Google’s script would check for successful conversion. After that Google will show the different variants to your traffic and collect conversion data.

- Alex