The Importance Of Split-Testing

The Importance Of Split-Testing

The average person makes a ton of decisions on autopilot every single day.

If you’re in business for yourself, then chances are you do this in your business as well as in your personal life.

For most personal decisions, running on auto-pilot and making decisions isn’t that important. It’s probably a blessing; we’d waste a ton of time if we actually decided everything on an everyday basis. It doesn’t matter what colour underwear you’re wearing or what type of drink you have in the evening. Autopilot allows us to spend our brainpower on more important things.

However, in business, the difference between massive success, marginal success and even failure can be down to automating our business-making decisions and not sufficiently testing them.

In copywriting, for instance, a slight change of wording in a call-to-action can mean you have a 3% conversion rate or a 1% conversion rate. That might not seem a lot, but for every one hundred readers you get, that’s a gain or loss of two sales.

Whether you’re selling 99p ebooks or Lamborghini cars, that adds up to a lot of money over the course of a long term business.

What is Split-Testing?

Split-testing is a pretty simple term, and it’s a pretty simple process.

You might have heard of it as A/B testing. Again, the name implies what you’re doing.

Essentially, you’re testing two or more options. For instance, you might have a website.

Do you get more clicks if your links are in blue or in red?

To split test, you’d implement a system where your links show blue half the time and red the other half.

You’d then look at the data and see which is better.

Presumably, you’d then change to the one which helped you more.

The link example is only a quick one, but it might make an incremental difference over time. There are a ton of other things you could split test for a website that’d have a much more powerful effect.

However, the real benefit of split-testing isn’t necessarily in the major changes. It’s in the accumulated minor changes.

Let’s say you had twenty variables for a website redesign. If each one of those gave you an extra 1% increase in traffic, then you could run the math and find that you’d make significant changes just by those incremental increases.

But enough of the website example because that’s pretty insignificant (except minor things always add up.)

Split-Testing Major Business Decisions

Your business – should you have one (and if you don’t, substitute your career or whatever) – will probably constitute three simple steps:

1. You find a gap in the market where you can provide a needed service
2. You produce a solution to said problem
3. You provide a great service in a timely fashion to the right market

That’s the secret to business. It’s not overly complex, and if you want to start a business, then you should start with answering those three simple problems.

However

When you lay out the bare basics like I’ve done above, you can already start to see where split-testing for major decisions becomes useful.

What’s the right market? A or B

What’s the right solution? A or B

How is the service or product best delivered? A or B

The reason I’m pointing this out is because in the intro I mentioned that most business decisions are made on auto-pilot.

It’s worth sitting down and simplifying your business in your head. What it is you do, why you do it and where you can test variables are simple things that you can clarify and expand upon.

For instance, I wrote way back about my freelance writing. I have a set of templates that work as a funnel for pitching for jobs, dealing with customer service and delivering the work I create for people.

I haven’t continually split-tested those templates. I should have done.

Even if your business is a simple Fiverr gig, you can test a ton of variables based on the three business questions:

1. What are you offering?
2. Who are you offering it to?
3. How are you delivering it?

Fiverr is a great place for experimenting with this for that reason.

So… What’s The End Game Of Split-Testing?

There are two answers to this question.

The first answer is that there isn’t really an end-game. Essentially every business that isn’t new or exploding in growth is in the constant process of trying to optimise their business. Incremental gains compound over time.

The second answer is that at some point, you’re going to want to expand. Whether you’re learning how to build websites hoping to have a million visitors, or you’re a writer trying to sell a ton of books, or you’re running a lawn-mowing service, at some point you’re going to want to take your business from something tiny into something massive.

The reason you should split-test and optimise now is that you want to have a well-oiled machine when the time comes to do that.

If you’re willing to invest in paid advertising, you can get millions of eyeballs on your product and service right away. But that costs money.

If you have a conversion rate of 1% and you spend a ton of money, it won’t be as great as if you nail down your split-testing, see massive improvements and get that conversion rate up to 4%.

Split-testing isn’t a particularly complicated subject and in most instances can be done without too much technological power or costs… so it only makes sense to do it as much as you can.

Turn auto-pilot decisions into conscious ones.