Digital marketing strategies for split testing

Split testing is fundamental to ensure high performance of any online digital marketing campaign. Most businesses except the notion that split testing can help enhance their digital marketing campaign but are unsure on how to pursue it. Split testing can in actual fact be a relatively complex subject and if you do not have a specialist in house team a good option can be to outsource this element to a specialist digital marketing agency. In this article we will outline the importance of 'breadth of impact' which you should consider when split testing the effectiveness of your website.

Breadth of impact

One of the greatest areas of confusion in relation to split testing is what exactly do you split test? There may be potentially hundreds of different areas of your website which you could test to improve its performance so where do you start? Although there is no definitive answers to the question there are a number of good guidelines which you can follow which are outlined below:

Pareto's Principle

Pareto's principle which is more commonly known as the 80/20 rule states that the vital few (20%) are in most cases responsible for the majority 80% of results. If this principle is applied to digital marketing and more specifically to split testing your website it predicts that a few important changes will most likely have the greatest impact on your results. Therefore it is more important when considering split testing to focus on a few fundamental areas rather than diversifying efforts on the trivial many. Below are a few tips of how this can be practically done:

Concentrate on the most important conversion actions: it is most likely that you have a number of desired conversion actions you would like your digital marketing campaign to achieve through your website. However when split testing it is best in most cases to concentrate on the most important conversion factors. For example if one of your products generates 40% of your companies sales and is the most successful product whilst another generates 1% of your total sales; in most cases it would be best to concentrate on the product which generates 40% of your total sales revenue. Improving the conversion rate of your best seller in the above example by even 10% would have a much larger impact on your net profits than doubling the conversion rate of your weakest product from 1% to 2%.

Focus on the best performing landing pages: most digital marketing campaigns utilise a number of different landing pages for specific purposes such as PPC, SEO, display marketing and social media optimisation. A natural tendency when split testing is to focus it on the landing pages which are not performing well. Although this is obviously a valid route the best performing pages should not be ignored as just because they are doing well it does not mean they do not have the potential to be enhanced further which can often unlock a great deal of value.

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