Yesterday at the local grocery store I noticed two Coin Star machines placed side-by-side. The machines were almost identical, save for the style and size of the font used in the title panel that displays the name “Coin Star.”

It is likely that the company’s product manager did this on purpose in order to see which machine attracts more users by experimenting with the two different types of signs. (Or, maybe one machine is just an older model!). Either way, this photo serves as a great real-world reference when explaining the Internet marketing technique called “split testing.”

Split Testing: A Proven Way to Increase Conversions

If you are like most website owners or webmasters, you want more traffic surging to your website on a daily basis so that you can make more money (or get more exposure to investors, etc.). But, have you given much thought as to what happens once the traffic gets there?

Identifying such desirable actions that your visitors take – often called “conversions” in Internet marketing lingo – is a key step to building a solid online strategy.

In fact, finding ways to increase your site’s “conversion rate” (i.e., # of people who take the desirable action / # of visitors) is a very worthwhile endeavor that should pay for itself many times over in terms of your time investment.

This is where split testing – sometimes called A|B split testing – comes in. This practice involves creating two similar landing pages (either on your existing site or hosted at two independent Web domains). The key is to make both pages identical in almost every way – save just one element (e.g., a certain image, a choice of wording, a price point, etc.).

Once you have set up your two pages this way, start driving traffic. Then, using your analytics package (I prefer Google Analytics), track which page brings you a better conversion rate. Once you have determined this, you simply start over again: make both pages identical (using the highest-converting page as the model), and then change yet another element – and so on. You can repeat this process forever. Provided that you have given each configuration enough time (or visits) such that you have gathered statistically significant data, split testing is a sure-fire way to improve your conversion rates.

Hint: be sure to only change one element at a time. That way, you can know for sure what it is that has contributed to the better conversion rate on one landing page versus the other.