Improve your Conversion with Split Web-page Testing

The decision to build an online business is not without challenges. Like every other start-up business, you will have to deal with a lot of experimenting and troubleshooting to increase the rate of sales.

In online businesses, your primary goal is not to create a substantial and aesthetically pleasing website, but a website that will effectively transform your visitors into customers. Your website’s power to turn its visitors into customers is referred to as the website conversion rate.

As a business owner, you must be involved in constantly tweaking your website to improve your conversion rate.

The Principle of Input-Output

The idea of split web-page testing all starts with the principle of input-output in internet marketing. The input for online moneymaking is the traffic that your website gets. On the other hand, the output is the total number of sales that you get from the traffic (The output is also referred to as conversions).

For example, your website may be getting as much as 3,000 visits in a day. A quick visit to Alexa.com will show you how much traffic your website is getting, as well as how many sites are linking in to your site.

However, your website traffic is only half the battle. The other more important half, the conversions, tell you how much you’re earning from your traffic. For example, out of the 3,000 visits, 70 of them purchase the product you are selling. In order to improve your conversion, you have to know first how to calculate it.

To calculate your conversion rate, you should use this equation: Output/Input X 100 = %

In the example I gave, the conversion rate is 2.3%, a rate the can obviously be improved. But how do you even do this? This is where creating two versions of your website come in. This may sound like an insane waste of time, but let me walk you through how it works.

How Split Web-page Testing Works

Creating two versions of your website is the first step in split web-page testing, also known as A/B Split Testing. The old web page and the tweaked web page will comprise the two versions of the website.

Improve Your Conversion

To improve your conversion, split web-page testing involves dividing website visitors into two groups. One group will be directed to the old version, while the other group will be directed to the tweaked version of the website.

The tweaked version is an altered version of the original one and will contain slight variations of the original one. (The conversation rates for the two groups will be compared, with the version having the better conversion rate as the final choice for the website of your online business).

The point of split web-page testing is to find out which alterations will help to improve your conversion rate.

If the altered version ends up having an improved conversion rate, then you better stick with the alterations done on the tweaked version.

Split web-page testing is a continual process that involves tweaking different parts of a website to improve your conversion to the optimum level. In the simplest terms, it is used to identify which parts of your website work and which ones need to be changed to compel visitors to buy your product.

What You Should Start Tweaking

In creating the altered version of your original website, what exactly are the features that you should tweak in order to compare the conversion rate? Here are a few features you should consider:

1. The Page Header

Consider a two back-to-back websites where the headers of the two websites are different. Other than that, everything else is entirely the same. By splitting the traffic of the visitors into two, the you can detect which of the websites had the better conversion rate based on the appeal of the header alone.

2. Purchase / Join Button

Another tweak you can do is the purchase / join link. You can experiment with a fancy “Add to Cart” / “Join Us” button or a simple link. This may seem like a negligible difference, but you’ll never know how much it can improve your conversion unless you include this tweak in the split web-page testing.

3. Site Navigation

How the visitors can navigate through your website is another factor considered in improving your conversion. Navigating your website can be done by a drop-down menu, or a simple set of links to the left / right side or bottom of the website. The ease of navigation can also determine the visitor’s decision to purchase your product.