Unless you’re already subscribed, when you read my blog you’ll see a box appear over the top of the page. That gives readers the chance to subscribe.

Once you’re subscribed you receive a short email each time I post to the blog, you get private access to password protected posts, and are informed the moment I start running the occasional massively discounted buying opportunities on each new product I launch.

I’m constantly split testing my blog sign-up boxes to find out which version produces the highest response. (In other words the boxes are constantly in being displayed in rotation, and software tracks which version gets the most people signing up.)

So here’s one first version I’ve tested, which has a short snappy message…

For every 1000 people who saw that popup, 13 people signed up to my blog (a 1.3% conversion rate.)

And here’s the other version I tested, which achieved a 4.7% sign up rate…

The latter popup therefore has a 261.5% lift in response compared with the first version.

Check out my post on how to calculate the lift in response.

The wording on the buttons is different, but the main factor at play is the more detailed headline.

This clearly demonstrates what any professional copywriter is shouting from the rooftops… the headline is one of the most response-affecting factors on any web page, popup, or any kind of advert or promotion for that matter.

If your site has weak headlines, I guarantee it will be underperforming. Start split testing (or even better multi-variate testing) and find out before you lose any more potential customers or clients.

Using AWeber (aff.) It only takes a few minutes to set up a split test like this, and you can do it on ANY kind of site, not just a blog.

-Ed.

Today I’m going to leave you with some rules that make split-testing more effective.

Warning: This is a long article, but I want to give you some critical tools. If I only told you half the story and you split-test incorrectly it could waste precious marketing budget. So here’s all the critical advice in one go.

Also please be aware that most of these rules apply not only to split testing Google Adwords, but to direct mail, web pages, print media adverts… in fact ANYWHERE you have the ability to provide more than one version of sales copy and have it displayed in rotation.

The Perfect Split.

The ideal split-test is where you get a true AB sequence. For example a magazine would print version A of your advert, then version B, then version A… and so on… as the individual magazines roll over the press.

When those magazines end up in the newsagents, each person who picks up the magazine will get A, B, A, B and so on. That’s a ‘perfect split’.

However I’ve found these days not many printers will go that far, but some newspapers do still have separate print runs for different parts of the country. And some magazines allow you to place inserts for different counties or regions of the country. And so on.

(In this examples always remember to take the regional levels of readership into account to calculate response rate accurately. For example a North/South split — if they have 5,000 readers in the North and 10,000 readers in the South… if you get 75 respondents from the North and 101 from the South, then the Northern version has greatly out-pulled the Southern version.

(A) 75 / 5000 X 100 = 1.5% conversion

(B) 101 / 10000 X 100 = 1.01%

So the (A) version is 48.5% more effective than the (B) version. (The formula to calculate the percentage lift in response is “WINNER% minus LOSER% divided by LOSER% multiplied by 100″.)

That means through simple split-testing you found an advert that for every 200 people who see the A version of your advert, you get an extra response. (E.g. a subscription, sales-lead or actual sale depending on the call to action in your advert.)

Hopefully the above introductory text has given you the mechanics and ideas for where to split-test.

Before you do, check out the follow 8 golden rules of split-testing. (Some are Google Adwords specific – I’ll tell you which those are when we get to them.)

1. Test Semantic Separation.

To quickly find the greatest leaps in sales-optimised advert copy you want to test adverts that have not only different words, but also entirely different MEANING… or “semantic separation” as it’s called in the testing world.

For example, I could write and split-test two adverts for my ‘Ultimate Business Blogging‘ home-study programme…

(a) Discover the Greatest form of Customer Communication Ever Invented.

(b) Revealed! The Most Powerfully Effective Way to Maximise Lifetime Value.

Although worded differently, those headlines both mean the same thing. (Using your corporate blog to communicate with existing customers.)

Split-testing those would probably only reveal minor differences in conversion because the meaning is the same.

Instead of the (b) advert copy, I would be better testing a second advert with a totally different meaning. Perhaps something like this:

(b) How to Attract Streams of New Customers in Less Than 24 Hours… Guaranteed!

That has a totally different meaning–using a blog to attract new customers. A split-test would then reveal which of the two facets of blogging is of greater import for my target audience — find new customers or sell more to existing customers.

(And of course it would be that headline that sells my product more effectively and which I would roll out on a wider scale.)

2. Always Get Outside Feedback.

You probably think about your products and services differently from end-users. It’s the main drawback to writing your own sales copy — you may use more technical words that don’t make sense to your general audience.

So, if you have access to an expert copywriter you may want to explain your split test ideas and get their advice. I’ve given links to recommended copywriters in the US and UK on this blog. (Check out my list of ‘Recommended Sites’ in the column on the right of this page.)

As well as occasionally getting copywriters to help me, I also use a piece of software called Glyphius to help me come up with strong (i.e. compelling and highly persuasive) adverts.

Glyphius has a massive internal database of words and phrases that are proven to increase sales. It even tells you what punctuation can increase response. (And punctuation can make a big difference.)

Finally, ask your customers and clients. Interview them or at the very least have an informal chat about the main benefits they’ve received. Make a note of those and also especially the way in which they describe those benefits. Then find a way to build those into your advert.

3. Investigate Your Competitors.

Check out competitors adverts to see what copy they’re using. Over a period of time you can start to see which adverts are winning — they’re the adverts competitors keep running over a longer period of time.

Google Adwords make this tactic particularly easy, but be careful. Some advertisers don’t check their adverts and just let them run and run even if they’re NOT profitable. Obviously you don’t want to get too much inspiration from those adverts.

The easy way to identify and ignore those adverts is to check out the pages you’re taken to when you click the advert. If the page you land on isn’t targeted to the wording in the advert, or not very persuasive and doesn’t make much effort to sell the product or capture your details as a sales-lead, then you can be confident they fall in the ‘More Money Than Sense’ (MMTS) category of Google Advertisers.

I was helping set up a private clients Adwords the other day. We typed in his main keyword and did a quick check on his competitors. Sure enough, his main competitors were running Google Adwords, and they appeared to be very well written and targeted to the keywords we typed in.

Unfortunately when we clicked them, most took us to pages that bore no resemblance to the keywords we had searched on or even the text in their advert. What a waste of money. In fact the worst one was the advert we clicked which took us to a “Page Not Found” message on the advertisers web site. Definitely a case of MMTS!

4. Eliminate Noise.

If sales and response to your Google Adword advertising suddenly drops off… maybe it’s simply due to the volume of searches being conducted? Be aware of seasonal fluctuations. Check your statistics BEFORE tweaking your ad copy.

A rule of thumb is that you should run split-tests over at least a 7 day period (regardless of how many clicks you get).

Because if in your industry customers are more responsive in the latter half of the week –o r maybe over the weekend — then a 7 day test period will include that fluctuation. Whereas if you only tested at say the beginning of the week, results would be distorted.

However, my personal take on this — it depends entirely on the industry! Some of my tests are confined to a single day, and that has proven to be enough to find a winner.

Here are some tips specifically for Google Adwords…

5) Always divide keywords into separate AdGroups.

That will allow you to write and split-test highly specific adverts for each adgroup. In most cases you want to use the keyword itself in the ad… you can only do that when keywords are divided into separate groups.

Here’s a slightly daft example, but hopefully one that clearly explains what I mean:

If you have a fruit shop, don’t just have a single Fruit adgroup containing “Apples” and “Oranges” keywords. Have separate AdGroups for each kind of fruit and use the name of the fruit in the advert copy itself.

Realise that the more your advert copy matches the keywords they type into Google to run a search, the more likely they’ll think “that’s what I’m looking for” and click your advert.

6) Split-test the display URL as well as the advert copy itself.

Yes, even the domain name shown in your advert can have a significant impact on response. Definitely try adding the keyword to the end of your domain name after a forward slash. www.TheFruitShop.com/Apples for example.

7) Capitalise Each Word In Your Advert.

Capitalising words in your advert makes it look more interesting (eye-catching) over adverts that are all mainly lower case. And punctuations like the ampersand ‘&’ can also increase response.

Don’t just look at the Click Through Rate.

The number of people who click your advert is very important. It affects how much money you pay Google. But it’s not the most important statistic. You want to keep an even closer eye on (and continually optimise) the back-end conversion rate. In other words, how many people see your sales letter versus how many people respond to it and subscribe, sign-up or buy the offer.

If you want a really in depth look at Google Adwords check out my Google Adwords Voyeur home-study programme – it contains more than 4 hours of live screen recordings and my narration.

(The only slight downside is that since I created that course Google have changed the interface quite a bit, but the core advice is still highly pertinent and powerful if you use Adwords.)

Of all the different things you can do with Google Adwords, split-testing is one of the most critical optimisations you can make. If you use Adwords, and know you only have a single advert, stop reading my blog NOW and go add some more!

Have a great weekend, and happy split-testing!

-Ed.

PS. Know anyone else who advertises and should be doing the splits? Please direct them to this article, Digg it, and vote on StumbleUpon if you have the toolbar installed. Thanks!

Google Adwords is one of the fastest ways of getting targeted –and usually ‘ready to buy’ — customers or clients on to a web site.

Search for any phrase on Google, and in a coloured box at the top of the page, and on the right hand side a plain White column of ‘Sponsored Links’ will appear. Those are Google Adwords text advertisements.

So, let’s say you sell all kinds of ‘Dimpled Widgets’, and want your advert to appear on Google when anyone searches for the phrase ‘dimpled widgets’.

Simply add that phrase to your Google account, set how much you want to pay each time someone clicks your advert (the “CPC” or “Cost Per Click”), and let it run.

Within 15 minutes of starting a new campaign I’ve seen streams of visitors arriving on sites and buying. It really is one of the most dynamic and powerful advertising systems ever invented.

Unfortunately, with that power comes complexity, and this is where many advertisers fail and give up with Adwords. They don’t understand some critical factors that make it profitable. This article covers one of them. If you have any intention of using Adwords, make sure you follow this carefully.

First of all, WHERE your adverts appear on Google is critical.

Ideally you want your adverts to be showing between positions 3 to 7. And definitely on the first page.

However, so do your competitors!

So they may decide to ‘outbid’ you.

If they agree to pay Google more per click than your adverts, it stands to reason Google will show their advert higher up the page, and push yours further down the page.

However, there’s a simple tactic you can employ and get leverage on — one that most Google Advertisors don’t make anywhere near enough use of — to your great competitive advantage if you’re smart enough to use it!

With this tactic you can pay less per click than your competitors yet still have your adverts showing above theirs.

Here’s a simple example.

Let’s say you’ve told Google you will pay up to 50 pence per click for the phrase “Dimpled Widget”.

And let’s say your competitor is paying up to 60 pence per click for the “Dimpled Widget” phrase.

To start with, your advert will likely show below your competitors, because after all, they’ll pay Google more for each click, so Google will initially favour their advert.

However, if the wording of your advert is more compelling and persuasive than your competitors, and your advert gets clicked twice in a day where your competitors advert only gets clicked once, you pay Google £1.00, and your competitor only pays Google 60 pence.

All of a sudden, even though you’re bidding less per click, your advert jumps above your competitor and pushes their advert down the page. (Actually there’s a bit more to it — especially something called the Quality Score — but this is the essence of how the system works).

So the number one question is, how do you optimise your text advert. How do you make them more persuasive and compelling, so they and get clicked more?

SPLIT TESTING.

In a nutshell, Google allows you to write more than one advert. You can use different headlines, words and punctuation. Even show a different web address.

Then Google rotates through each of the adverts every time your phrase (in this example “Dimpled Widgets”) is searched.

Over time, you will find that one of those adverts out-performs all of the others. And that is the one which may start beating your competitors adverts. (If they’re not split testing it won’t take you long to beat them… where you’re paying a much lower cost per click and yet displaying adverts above them.)

At this point I’m frequently asked how many adverts you should have in rotation at any one time. That’s really dependent on the volume of searches for your chosen phrases.

For example if only a small number of people search for ‘Dimpled Widgets’ each day then you would only have two adverts in rotation. Otherwise if you had a lot in rotation it would take too long to find a winnner.

However if your chosen keywords are heavily searched phrases, that hundreds or thousands of people search for on Google each day, you may have up to 5 adverts or more in rotation at any one time… because you’ll still find out which is a winner in a short space.

WHAT DO DO WHEN YOU FIND A WINNING ADVERT.

1) Make a note of the losing adverts (you don’t want to reintroduce those in the future so don’t forget what you already tested)

2) Pause or delete the losers

3) Take the winning advert that has the highest CTR (Click Through Rate) and then make new adverts based on that one — but change one of more of the lines. So in essence you’re now testing variations of the winnining advert. This fine tuning is where you really start making a difference.

4) Add the winning advert to your web page (integrate the wording). That way when people click from Google and arrive on your site, the ‘offer’ made in the advert is repeated on the web page. This consistency usually results in better post-Google-click activity.

As you can imagine, the real trick is being able to write great advert in the first place.

Tomorrow I’ll explain how to write persuasive adverts, reveal how punctuation makes all the difference, and give you a link to special “Copywriting Cheat” software I use that contains a database of tens of thousands of winning adverts and can actually predict if a new advert will win or lose even before it goes on Google.

See you tomorrow.

-Ed.

I just got back from Paul Gorman’s “Leave Them in the Dust” seminar.

As usual it was an awesome weekend spent in the company of an amazing group of people. And the range of strategy, detailed tactics and depth of content Paul covered was quite staggering.

As someone who has been on the ‘Paul Gorman Roadshow’ for more than 4 years now (starting with me attending his £35,000 week-long “Business Millionaire” seminar in Brighton in December 2003), I’m especially sad there won’t be any more marketing seminars.

Paul changed my life. And I do mean that quite literally.

If you’ve not heard about Paul, you can still buy his books and exceptional home-study programmes from www.PaulGorman.com. All strongly recommended.

As mentioned last week, at Paul’s request I also spoke at the event. I generally avoid public speaking for a number of reasons, so on the basis “repetition is the mother of all skill” my public speaking style isn’t particularly refined.

However, based on feedback I’m relieved to say it seems my 2 hour talk on Internet Marketing was well received. (Nobody fell asleep or left the room… always a good sign.)

The first point I raised in my talk was to not listen to anyone who says the first promotional tactic to do after launching a new web site is to “pay for search engine optimisation to get it listed on Google”.

I’ve been saying this for years — there are so many less risky and much faster ways of getting gargantuan streams of traffic (qualified prospects) onto web sites without risking lots of money on SEO (search engine optimisation).

SEO should come later once the site’s proven it can convert visitors into customers, definitely not before.

Then I got stuck into landing pages… spent the rest of the 2 hours covering sales-lead generation and customer acquisition, and how to split-path and multi-variate test. I think it all went OK based on post-talk feedback.

And after my talk, the first three business owners who I spoke with all said the same thing. They had each invested many thousands of pounds — and lots of faith — in outsourced search engine optimisation services… and had NO return on investment.

Literally, not one of them had a single extra sale or enquiry, and their sites are nowhere to be found on Google. Shocking.

In fact one business had even been advised by their web company to NOT split-test their Google Adwords, which must qualify as “The World’s Worst Internet Marketing Advice” I’ve ever heard.

Split-testing Google Adwords — which are the small ‘Sponsored’ adverts you see at the top and right side of Google’s search results) is not only quick and easy but is also one of the fastest ways of lowering your bid price.

These business owners had been given dreadful, dreadful advice. (Liz ∓ Lucy: Get a new agency to handle your Google Adwords as a matter of urgency… the ones you have will be costing you a fortune.)

I also discovered very few business owners in the room had even heard about, let alone use, landing pages, split-path or multi-variate tested landing pages, or even able to track their web statistics.

It’s just not common knowledge, which is a shame because all of those methodologies have been available for years now, and the software required is incredibly inexpensive these days (or even free, like Google Analytics for example.)

So… it appears I’m still on track.

I was worried it was getting dated, but it’s obvious the advice in my now 2 year old book is still as fresh and valid today as it was when I wrote it back in 2005. There is as much need for business owners to get this advice and apply the tactics to their web sites today as there was back then.

If you were at the event, it was nice meeting you and I hope we get the opportunity to meet again someday.

But whether or not you were at the event, I look forward to using my blog to explain what I didn’t have time to cover in my 2 hour slot, starting tomorrow with split-testing Google Adwords. (Liz & Lucy especially… get ready to grab a pen and take notes! .

-Ed.

My new Internet marketing guide Landing Page Power is nearing completion – it’s taking a bit longer than expected simply because I’m packing so much in to it.)

One of the topics I cover in a lot of detail is how to scientifically split-test landing pages. I advocate two methods – split testing, and multi-variate testing.

There’s a massive difference between the two methodologies. But they both produce the same end result… for very little extra effort, you get to find out which version of a web page produces the highest level of sales (or sales-leads).

In other words you create multiple variations of the same page – test different designs, different headlines and so on against each other… you find out (automatically) exactly which version wins in terms of conversion. It’s an incredibly powerful weapon to add to your web marketing.

However, one common mistake that’s made when comparing winning pages goes like this (and I’ll use a live example of a split test I’m currently monitoring for a private client).

Page version ‘A’ is producing a 29% conversion.

Page ‘B’ is ‘only’ producing a 23% conversion (I’ve got tongue-in-cheek when I say ‘only’ … because most marketers will do cartwheels down the street if they achieve more than single digit conversion.)

So we know that for each 100 visitors that see page A, we can be sure that on average 29 of those visitors will convert (i.e. respond to the page and buy the product, or in this case download a whitepaper), and 23 out of every 100 people who see page B are converting.

Now many people assume that through split testing that means the winning web page (A) is 6% more effective than the B version.

If you think that – you’re actually mistaken! (In my experience it’s a simple but quite common miscalculation).

The difference, or what in the industry we call “the percentage lift” is actually 26.1% !

Here’s the formula…

Split testing suddenly becomes quite exciting when you understand and actually see how it increases sales by actually LARGE percentages… many times for doing little more than testing headlines against each other.

Keep your eyes peeled on this blog because Landing Page Power will reveal exactly how I setup split testing for my private clients… and for the first 24 hours it’ll be available at a crazy low price.

~Ed.

[tags]split testing, multi-variate testing, multi-variable testing, conversion rate, lift in response[/tags]