I was up pretty early today and before I even had any breakfast I decided to set up a split test on my sales page. A split test allows you to test two different pages against each other, so in my case I changed up my sales page a bit, and also changed some colors around, all this to see what version converts the best.
Let me explain a bit more. Say if you have a product sales page on a website, but you are always thinking if changing things would bring you better results or more sales, what a split test will do is automatically swap two versions of a page around for you, so 50% of your visitors see your normal page, and the other 50% see the adjusted version.
All that happens now is you collect data from your visitors to find out which one of the pages converted better over time, so if your new version of your page made 10 sales, but your older one made just 2, this is basically letting you know that people prefer whatever it was you did in the new version, in fact they liked it so much they bought more of your product.
Split Test No Longer Hard To Do
I’ve always thought that split tests would be hard to set up or just require me to insert tons of code, but thanks to Google that’s not the case anymore. Google has a split test page generator, and best of all its really easy to use!.
I’ll walk you through it so you can set one up yourself if you ever need to use this for testing purposes. All you need to do first is make another version of the page you need to split test against, and you can pretty much change it all if you need to. So go ahead and get the other page ready then come back a follow along with me.
STEP ONE:
Login to your Google Adwords account and hit the “Tools” tab, once in that page you need to look down on the right hand side for this part…
If you have trouble finding it just type ‘google website optimizer’ into a Google search and it should pop right up.
Next click on the Website Optimizer link.
Now you will be taken to a page that introduces you to what the website optimizer can do, like this part…
That’s the part we are looking for, but on this page all you need to do is hit the Get Started>> link at the bottom. If this is the first time you have done this the next 2 pages are selecting your time zones(which u should not need help with;), and then the Terms Of Service Agreement, remember to read all of this before you tick AGREED, ya right!.:)
Congrats you are ready to go!!!.
STEP TWO:
Now we are all ready to try our first experiment so let’s dive in, hit that [+Create a new experiment] blue link on that screen.
Now on your screen you have two options to pick, but this time all you need to do is click on that A/B Experiment link to get to the next page.
Its checklist time!. Google is showing you what you need to have done to carry on with the rest of the set-up for your split test. But basically you need to know which page you want to test, have an alternative page to test against, and you need to know what conversion page people need to hit from these pages to count as a score.
[example]: In my case, my conversion page would be the thank you page after someone has bought my product, but its the way they got their that will be counted, did they come through page A(original page), or page B(new version page)?, whatever one they did come through Google will log and display to you after.
Once you know and have all this information all you need to do is tick the “I’ve completed the steps above and I’m ready to start setting up my experiment” box and hit that “Create>>” button.
Now the final step is the code part, but worry not, its pretty simple.
STEP THREE:
We are now at the part where we need to enter the experiment name and some URL’s. Now you can call your experiment anything you wish too, just make sure you know what it means so that if you come back to this after some time away you know what it’s all about:).
Original URL: is…, you guessed it, the place you need to enter the page you want to test against, which in my case was my sales page homepage.
Page Variation URL: this is the place to paste in your new page you want to test against the original one. You can change the name of this from “Variation One” if that floats your boat?, but its not necessary to do so:).
Under the Page Variation URL box you should see an (+ add another page variation) link, and if you want to test more than one changed version of a page this is what you need to click to do so, then just paste page test number 3 0r C into the URL box.
Identify Your Conversion Page: As I said above once you have picked what your goal page is, you just need to paste it into this box.
All filled in????, great hit that “Continue>>” button at the bottom of the page.
The page after this asks you who will be installing the code into your pages, the two options are someone else will be installing your code into the pages, in which case Google will send installation and validation instructions to them right away. Or the other option is YOU will be installing the code, and remember it’s not that hard to do so don’t worry about it.
Once you pick your option click continue to go grab your code.
The next page can seem a bit daunting but it really is only 3 chunks of code that you need to copy and paste into your site. The first one is…
Here you see two box’s of code, the first one you just need to copy and paste into the beginning of your ORIGINAL page’s source code, I put mine right after the <body> tag.
The second box of code is for tracking purposes, so again copy this and paste it in the same source code as above, but this time right before the closing </body> tag of your code.
Once this is done SAVE it and upload it back to your web server.
Code#2
Now for the code to put into your new version(variation) pages, so copy this block of code and paste that into the source code again right above the closing </body> tag. This would be the same code to paste for all of your variation pages if you have more than one.
Code#3
This is the code you paste into your conversion(goal) page, and again right above </body> tag. And your done, now that was a lot of pasting ah:). Remember to save all your code edits and upload back to the server.
All you now need to do is VALIDATE PAGES!, hit that button and let Google do the rest, hopefully it all works fine with zero errors, if not Google will let you know what changes you need to make to correct any issues. But hopefully we will be fine.:)
So that’s it you are now live and split testing your stuff, well done!. Depending on traffic it may take a while to get data back, but once this comes in you get to see visits, conversions and conversion rate for each tested page, after Google collects enough data it will declare a winner of your experiment for you, this will let you know if your new page version rocks, or just sinks like a stone to the bottom of the abyss.
Now all you need to do is keep testing until you find an awesome converting page that gets em everytime!:).
Good Luck:).
Tags: split testing, split tests
