Optimising your Website through Split Testing

Hopefully as a website owner you have already come to appreciate that the website you build or commission is not for you; it is for your customers. With this understood it is important to be able to think like your website visitors in order to provide them with the information and interface that they are expecting.

You may well sit down and have a hard think yourself about the kind of information required. An effort to empathise with the prospects will take you so far. Perhaps in addition you will also undertake some market research to quantify and classify the level of understanding of product and the kind of thing that they want to see.

Even with that done however there may be an optimal way to display the information or wording for the introductory paragraph. If only we could test various versions to see which one works best.

Using Split Testing (and it's big brother Multivariate Testing) you can have more than one version of your website available to visitors. While each individual visitor will only see one version, the success of each version is recorded allowing you to decide from the real world stats which version is performing better.

Of course it is necessary for you to set up clear performance goals before you start. These might be number of click throughs, number of contacts made, number of products purchased or something similar and relevant to your site.

There are many companies that offer this kind of split testing, some are free and some are paid. There are also organisations that provide interpretation and recommendations based on the results.

Be sure to use split testing on your site as a way of continually improving the quality and relevance of the information that it displays to the user.