Blog Series: How To Test For Internet Marketing Success: Part 1 — What NOT to Test

You can test nearly every facet of your marketing campaign, including copy, design, offers, key messages and more. These are not only options for testing, but they are both easier and less expensive than other media types. That being said, testing everything is detrimental to both cost and time. No one has the unlimited time or funds…

First things first, you need to decide what you will be testing. Like a science experiment you should first develop a test hypothesis to determine both what you think the test will achieve, and what you’d like it to achieve. Like similar scenarios, often times determining what to include is found by determining what not to include. Don’t include things that will likely make no difference. Questions like these will only waste your time and not deliver the right results.

The term ‘best practices’ is there for a reason, and this should be another red flag to leave out of your test. If it common knowledge that doing something a certain way is a commonly accepted best practice with published results, the general rule of thumb is that it works, and should be trusted. Use the experience of others to your benefit and save yourself time and money.

Do your homework and seek all the experts and best practices at your disposal. Now that you’ve gotten started, you’ll find a much more concise list of what you want to test and where to go from here.

One example of a best practice is having a form on the right hand side of the page. Virtually all of the landing pages we create have the form on the right hand side. When we started doing landing pages, we tested forms on the left side and they didn’t work as well. Many have come to the same conclusion over the past few years. So here is a good example of both something that we have tested and something that has also become a best practice.Do your homework and seek all the experts and best practices at your disposal. Now that you’ve gotten started, you’ll find a much more concise list of what you want to test and where to go from here.

 

Download Nowspeed’s How To Test For Internet Marketing Success White Paper to learn more.