“Why isn’t my marketing campaign working?” One of the main reasons could be that you (or the staff of your marketing agency) are not applying A/B Testing. Experienced internet marketing agencies are familiar with the concept and can use it to great effect as a method to multiply your conversion rate. In fact, many regard it as being the #1 deal maker/breaker for online success. How are they doing it?
What is A/B Testing?
Before we show you how it can increase your bottom line, let’s establish the definition of A/B Testing. The term refers to marketing testing wherein a control sample is contrasted against another variable sample. Two of anything – a campaign, advertisement, landing page, email or direct mail, status update or virtually anything else – can be tested against each other. Even general things like colors, designs, GUIs and navigation panels can benefit from being selected via this technique.
Other terms that may be used interchangeably with A/B Testing include: Bucket Testing, Split Testing, Multivariate Testing and Multi-variable Testing.
Allowing a Marketing Firm to Apply A/B Testing to Your Website, Social Media and Ad Copy
There is a distinct difference between allowing a digital marketing firm to apply this special technique to your website, social media and ad copy versus going it alone? Naturally, you alone can do something as simple as run two similar ads and see which one performs better. This is only a baby step in contrast with how in-depth A/B Testing can be within the comprehensive and intricate workings of a digital marketing firm.
There are numerous, nearly limitless ways that the firm could be applying multivariate methodologies. And most likely their approach will achieve more profound results due to their high level of marketing knowledge.
Effective A/B Testing
One of the best ways to test the effectiveness of something is to isolate it. Two landing pages that are identical other than their background or text color would constitute a proper A/B test. If more than one variable is tested simultaneously within the same test, it becomes difficult if not impossible to pinpoint which variables account for the performance difference between the control group and the test group. There are many other ways that your digital marketing firm can ensure that they are setting up these tests properly.
Marketing Experience Matters in Ensuring A/B Testing Efficiency
The marketing experience of an established firm makes a huge difference in how effective the tests are. Your effort to run two ads, as in the original example above, could be less effective than a digital marketing company’s effort to conduct the same type of test. This is because a qualified and practiced internet marketing company knows exactly how to write ad copy, after having done so for thousands upon thousands of other companies in the past.
Both ads run by the marketing company in a multi-variable test could be well-structured, strategic ads that perform well overall, just one better than the other. The two ads you run could fall flat, and the test could be a waste of ad budget. The agency’s broad understanding of tests they have run for all of their clients works to your advantage. Unless you yourself have worked in marketing for a number of years, you simply do not have this asset in your arsenal.
The Importance of Monitoring
Your digital marketing company can run countless A/B tests at once – and apply the methodology to every aspect of your business model, marketing efforts and advertising campaigns. Again, this is something that you could do also. But, how would you monitor all of that data?
How many tests give an accurate sampling? How long does it take to make a determination on what is working and what isn’t? These are questions whose answers are closely linked to the conscious and responsive monitoring of multivariate test data. They are also answered more easily by an experienced marketing firm who possesses many tools and analytics to measure, report and display performance and sales metrics.
Jared Pomranky
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