Improve conversion rates with a simple A/B split test
You understand the importance of creating custom landing pages to direct your PPC traffic to, and have even followed all the best practices for creating great landing pages. Done and done, right?
Wrong! Because it’s very easy to do some A/B split testing on those landing pages to determine what design/page elements are best at driving conversions. You’d be surprised how one small change can dramatically impact your conversion rate.
Some ideas you might test out on your website or landing page can include the location of the call-to-action, button color or text within the button, images used, and content such as testimonials and trust badges. You may also want to test a designated PPC landing page vs. an existing page on your website to see which performs better.
To split your traffic and measure your results, Google AdWords Experiments is a free, easy-to-use platform to execute many tests. In addition to testing within paid search to achieve higher conversion rates, those results can also be leveraged across other channels such as SEO and email. There are also 3rd party landing page testing tools such as Optimizely that can split your traffic beyond paid search.
It’s important to remember to just test one criteria at a time – otherwise you won’t know what triggered the different response. With that said, if you are running a test in AdWords, make sure to refrain from making bid changes unless you will be applying them to both the control and experiment.
Additionally, ensure you run each test long enough to get sufficient engagement on both pages to yield statistically meaningful results. Niel Patel has an easy to use statistical significance calculator which takes both test variation results’ traffic and divides that by the total goal completions to determine if your test results are weighty enough to make a decision.
Once you’ve collected those results, you now have a tested and proven blueprint for creating landing pages with all the features that you know work best for your audience. You can then apply that knowledge to other pages on your website and other marketing materials.
Unfortunately, many PPC agencies don’t have the design resources in-house to build and test multiple landing pages for your campaigns. But hey – we do! If you’re interested to see how a little testing can make a big difference for your PPC campaigns, let’s talk.
Diane Callihan
With more than 20 years of experience writing for some of the country’s top brands, Diane helped to shape Roger West’s content strategy, lead generation, and PR efforts as Director of Marketing. She currently serves as President of Callihan Content Creation.