In addition to a Google Adwords campaign, you can fine-tune your online marketing efforts with a split-testing initiative on other areas of the site. Here are five more opportunities to run a split-test so you can learn more about your customer and generate responses from the right type of visitors:
1. Your signup pages. Whether you have a newsletter signup box on your homepage, or are just collecting e-mail addresses for a free download, running a split test in this area can help you determine what types of freebies your visitors respond well to. The words and marketing copy you use in these areas can be manipulated to deliver different messages; when you’ve defined what the most effective messages are, it also becomes easier to insert these messages into a Google Adwords ad.
2. Your shopping cart. Monitoring the activities on your shopping cart can help you learn more about your customer’s buying habits, likes, dislikes and general interests. This is valuable way to monitor keywords and keyphrases, especially if you can track what items are most searched for on your site. Split testing here might involve different messages during the checkout process to determine which customers continued shopping after selecting an item, and which ones proceeded to the checkout.
3. Product-specific pages. Every product you sell on your site will have its own page, and each of these pages represents a great opportunity for marketing. Don’t discount the importance of the copy on an individual product’s page on a customer’s ultimate decision to buy or not to buy. Attention-grabbing copy in this area can indeed work wonders in increasing sales. This is also a great place to employee the strategy of split testing – vary the messages presented to customers on your site’s product-specific pages, and be sure to note which particular messages seem to prompt the most sales As mentioned above, the insights gained here can easily be applied to AdWords ads
4. Sales letters. The immediacy of sales letters makes them a valuable, time-tested marketing tactic, and these letters are another place where split testing can be used to your advantage. By sending out a variety of different sales letters to potential customers and monitoring which result in clickthroughs to product pages can help you to better tailor your message to your target audience, and likewise to create more appealing AdWords ads.
5. Your e-mail newsletter. From autoresponder e-mail messages to complete e-newsletters, you can monitor the response rates of different types of messages to identify your ‘winning’ messages. Monitor results for months -even years – with different variations to drill down to the key messages that resonate with your ideal customers.