Split Testing Landing Pages

Your landing pages are an important part of the inbound marketing process. They act as an information gathering tool; collecting names, email addresses and other details from your website visitors. These details can then be used in further online marketing campaigns for closing deals with potential customers.

Yet, like many aspects of online marketing, you need to ensure your landing pages are optimised for your target audience. Not optimising these pages can result in lower returns from your marketing efforts. To maximise your landing page’s success, you can run a split test campaign.

This article is about why you should do split testing and how you can manage a campaign.

What Is Split Testing?

Split testing is the process of having two versions of the same landing page that has just a single difference between them. The variation between the two pages can be as slight as the call to action button or as complex as the page’s colour scheme or design.

When a business is conducting a split test campaign, there should be an even distribution of visitors to the two different pages. This allows for proper and accurate analysis of the results and for you to make informed decisions.

Why Should You Be Conducting Split Tests?

Split testing landing pages is an essential aspect of your website’s maintenance. On a basic level, split testing allows you to optimise your landing pages so more people sign up to your email newsletter or buy a product.

Optimising your website’s landing pages can’t be done just by adjusting your website and seeing if anything improves the results. Split testing offers more benefits for your websites that just optimising your site. For instance, just making changes without having a control is not an accurate method for recording results and can slow down the data gathering process. This is because you don’t know if there has been a shift in the audience being directed to your site or whether your audience’s response is dependent on the season / time of the year.

Split testing allows you to speed up the testing process by seeing results over a week; rather than testing the landing page for months. Also, because you are keeping both versions of the landing pages, if the original performs better – you don’t have to re-create that page.

What Can You Test In Split Testing?

There are many different elements which can be changed during a split test campaign. Here are some of the elements on your landing page that you could change and some ideas for tests.

Headline

The heading on your landing page is very important. It can signal to the reader what the page is about and what they are being offered. Therefore, ensuring that this is optimised can be very important. It isn’t just the headline copy that can be tested; you can adjust the headline’s colour, position and style.

Sub headline

Just like the headline, there are many changes that can be made to the sub headline. The sub headline is something can develop the interest of your audience further by giving lots of information about what the offer is but without giving away too much detail.

Page copy

The page copy can be changed significantly. Some of the basic changes are similar to how you can change the headline or sub headline. However, you are not limited to the style, colour, position or the actual copy. There is also the option to change the format; you can add in bullet points or shorten paragraphs.

Images

The images on your landing page are very important. The human mind can process images quicker than text and it plays a very crucial role in the purchasing decision process. The different elements of the landing page’s image that can be changed, except for the image itself, include:

• Image size.
• Image position.
• Colour or black and white.
• Image rotation.
• Image shape (the same image being in square / circle).
• Change it from a still image to a video.

Call To Action

The call to action on your landing page is the area of the website that converts the visitors to leads. Therefore, you should be constantly testing this part of the landing page to ensure that the correct design. There are many different tests you can complete with your call to actions. For instance:

• The text of the image.
• The button shape.
• The button colour.
• The position of the call to action button.
• The size of the call to action.
• The text colour.

Social Proof

The professional image of your business and the service it presents can rest upon the social proof you offer on the landing page. Whether this is a client testimonial or a collection of reviews that are aggregated into a star rating; your reviews can convince visitors to convert. Try swapping your testimonials every so often to see if another is more persuasive.

How Long Should You Run A Test?

The length of time that you should run a split test depends on the number of visitors you have. If you have several thousand visitors per day, you could run a campaign each week before analysing the results. If you only have a couple of hundred, you should run the tests for a month.

What Should I Do After I Have Finished Testing A Landing Page?

Once your split testing has been completed, you will need to look at which landing page has performed the best. There are several factors to look at including the sign-up rate but also the number of customers each landing page eventually generated. It may be that one page created more leads but had a lower lead to customer rate.

Once you have decided which landing page has performed best, you take the other landing page off your site and then run another test making a slight change to the landing page that performed best on the previous test.

Conclusion

Testing your landing pages continuously will allow you to improve your landing pages, grow your business and achieve better sales. Split testing is the best way you can adjust your website’s landing pages and is very easy to implement. All you need to do is to decide which element to test, how long to run the tests and how to divide the traffic that lands upon your site.