Copywriting is, in many ways, an art form. The goal is to weave words together in a way that attracts visitors, keeps them on the page, and leads them towards purchasing your products. You need to be a skilled wordsmith that understands how to grab the reader’s attention – one that understands the art of writing and reaching an audience.
But there’s a science to SEO as well. By testing two (or more) distinct pieces of copy, you can see which of them has the highest purchase rate, the lowest bounce rate, the highest click-through rate, and more.
Split Testing Different Types of Copy
Websites often use split testing to ensure their copy or advertisements get results. Often businesses start with a few completely different drafts of copy, and then perform small tweaks on each to see which delivers greater results.
Split testing is an excellent method of collecting data on your website copy. Yet many companies split test incorrectly. While split testing can be a beneficial tool, you need to make sure you’re collecting relevant data, and the only way to do that is to first establish a working, popular website – and only afterward start split testing your website.
Why to Wait to Split Test
- Small Sample Sizes
There are dozens of factors that affect website analytics, and many of them change over time. That’s why it’s important to split test in a very short period of time (about a week or less), when no other factors affecting the marketplace could change your results. If your website is not yet popular, you’ll be dealing with too small a sample size to be relevant.
- Establishing a Marketing Presence
In addition, during the early stages of marketing it’s very likely that you have yet to develop a clear and established source of hits. Unless your website is well developed, you’ll likely be getting visitors from a very random hodgepodge of websites, a couple of hits per keyword, and so on. Each source can also affect the results of your split test. When the sample sizes are larger it’s easier to check against these sources and see if there’s a difference.
- Changing Your Content Later
It’s also not uncommon to change your content focus and how you’re marketing it as your website develops. Split testing is only valuable if you plan on making permanent changes with the data. If not because you plan it all later, the time you spend split testing will be meaningless.
Split testing is an effective way to discover the best possible copywriting and advertising techniques for generating sales. But make sure you’ve taken the time to develop your website and create a search engine presence before you start split testing your content.
