Someone who bought Building an eBook Empire asked me for more information on the split page testing. I have a split testing product link in there that I believe may not work anymore but luckily, Google’s come up with something even better – and I’ll update the eBook to reflect this.

I didn’t even know about this tool until I had to write an eBook for someone else on a certain PPC strategy. It’s Google’s Website Optimizer (GWO) – and it’s FREE – yea! I always prefer to recommend free tools to my readers whenever there’s something viable.

If you go to http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer and sign up or register with an existing Google Analytics account, you can easily split test your web pages until they perform to the best of their ability – this includes simple landing pages or full length sales pages.

You’ll be using an A/B split test – it pits version A against version B. Whichever one wins, you then test THAT version against a new version – it’s a continual process.

Once logged in, go to the optimizer and click Get Started. Answer the questions as you go – location, time zone, TOS, communication preferences, etc. Then you’ll be taken to a page that has a link that says Create a new experiment.

You’re going to test one variant against another – like a single headline or the bullet points or your guarantee. Just one element at a time or else you won’t know what made the difference in your conversion rate.

After choosing the A/B split test option, let the system know which two page URLs you want to test. Give it a name like “Bullet Point Test” or whatever you choose to help you identify the experiment.

The GWO will be able to tell which page led to more conversions because you’ll insert a little bit of HTML code into your website. Simply open your index file or whatever the page is in something like FrontPage, figure out where you’re supposed to add the code, according to the GWO site, and paste it in there. Don’t forget to re-upload the new version to your hosting server!

GWO will validate your page to see if it’s working and then you sit back and wait for the results!

You’ll be able to see the reports that show you which elements that you tested work best for conversion purposes (THIS headline, with THESE bullet points and THIS guarantee), etc.

Most marketers are too lazy to split test – I’ve been guilty of it. If you do it, you can really trample all over your competitors.

Tiff

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