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Marketing & Revenue Growth
Grow Profits by Split-Testing Ads
By: Boris Mordkovich
Comments: 1
Successful business owners and marketing professionals know that great results from advertising are rarely owed to luck and guessing. Whether they specialize in online or offline promotion, they have known for years that the secret to achieving high return of investment is through splittesting.
Split-testing is a way of measuring multiple ads, creative layouts, and landing pages against each other to learn which ones perform better, and which will, in turn, improve your overall return on investment.
The way it works is quite simple: you start by taking an existing ad from any search engine that you advertise on. Then, change one word or offer in the headline or in the description of the ad to create a new ad, and run both simultaneously. Within a few days or weeks, depending on your traffic and sales volume, you will collect enough data to determine which version converts better.
Once you have that information, leave the “winner” as is and introduce a new “challenger” ad with a different variable changed. It can be a different offer or promotion, or simply different phrasing.
A word of caution, though – don’t change more than one variable at a time. If you do, you won’t know exactly what is responsible for the increase or drop in conversions.
Also keep in mind that you can conduct the same sort of testing on your landing pages; it is, in fact, very important to constantly work on improving your website visitors’ experiences because this leads to an increase in the overall click-to-action conversion rate, which is the best way to raise your revenue and profit (while keeping your advertising expenses at the same level).
There are a number of great tools on the market that can automate the split-testing process for you: these include Vertster.com, Sitespect.com and OfferMatica.com
Split-testing is an ongoing process that never really ends. There is always room for improvement. But if you do it diligently and increase your conversion rates little by little, before you know it you will gain a tremendous advantage over your competition by being able to squeeze the maximum value out of each dollar.
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Published on Thursday, June 01, 2006
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I agree with you that split-testing ads is very important. However, all tools I know lack the ability of taking the ads' positions into account. Thus, the results of those tools are always inaccurate when two ads are compared that were displayed on different average positions. Keep in mind: CTRs grow exponentially with higher positions.
Today we released a Free Position Sensitive A/B Split-Testing Tool which should provide more accurate results.
Check it out!
http://www.marketing2null.de/free-position-sensitive-ab-split-tester/
I would appreciate your feedback.
Posted by: Andreas
Wednesday, December 12, 2007