Are you nervous to try your hand at online advertising? How are you supposed to find your perfect customer? What if you’re reaching the wrong people? Or worse …not reaching anyone?! 

The biggest question is well…how are you supposed to know? The only real answer is to test and this is where most business owners get nervous about Fresno digital marketing. Testing sounds like there may be a loss in investment, but when you test with a purpose, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

A/B split testing is one strategy that marketers use to figure out a variety of things about their audience, what they’re attracted to, and their customer’s buying patterns. Running two different ads can be a little more costly, but it pays off majorly in the long run. In fact, we have covered A/B split testing from A-Z in this informative blog post (and believe it or not, we even covered “the hard letters” Q, X, Y, and Z). 

A is for Audience

As mentioned above, split testing is awesome for getting to know your audience better. Not just any audience either, your audience. This means that these specific people are related to you and find value in your product and/or service. In order to hone in on who your audience is, it’s best to cast a wide net in two areas that you feel are related and test to see which performs better for you. Then in the future, you can continue testing in that sector and begin to get more and more specific.

B is for Benchmarking

When speaking in marketing terms, benchmarking is the process of measuring a business’s performance against its competitors to get a better understanding of where they land on the scale on their niche. If you apply benchmarking to split testing, your business can run an ad similar to those that your competition runs and your original ad idea to see who performs better. Sometimes, you may discover that the competitor’s style does better–and who’s to say that you need to fix the wheel when it’s not broken?

C is for Call to Action

We recently received another SEO email from a company trying to sell us web ranking services. As we received this email, it was fun for us to turn the tables on them. How do we introduce the following report and/or respond to it? Of course, every advertisement should have a clear call to action but sometimes it can be difficult to choose the right one. Some CTA’s have more “oomph” behind them and get your customer to actually click through to your offer. Split testing is a great way to try different CTA’s to figure out which one works for your company. We recently received another SEO email from a company trying to sell us web ranking services. As we received this email, it was fun for us to turn the tables on them. How do we introduce the following report and/or respond to it?

D is for Demographics

The marketing definition of demographics is segmentation by age, race, religion, gender, family size, ethnicity, income, and education. There are other factors that may play into segmentation, but overall it’s important to understand these facts about your ideal audience’s lives so that you can better connect with them. 

Facebook advertising offers awesome campaign options and pixels to help track these facts about your audience members, which provides the optimal opportunity to split test ads.

E is for Engagement

Above all else, getting an audience to engage with you is important. This shows genuine interest in your product or service. Split testing allows marketers to measure which advertisements are getting better engagement than others.

F is for Funnel

As a business person, you probably love the word funnel because funnels create automation. Everyone loves making money while they sleep, right?! Split testing allows business owners to improve their sales funnels on all levels, whether it’s on the front end with testing different types of paid advertising or by testing different landing pages to see which has higher conversions.

G is for Geotargeting

Geotargeting is a strategy that companies can use to better understand where their customers are and cater to that location. There are a few stipulations that are associated with geotargeting and you can learn about them in our last blog post, Where in the World?: Geolocation & Why Your Company Needs It.  

Besides using geotargeting on your website, you can also use geotargeting in PPC split testing to understand where your customers truly are. If a nearby small town has a demand for your product, you may have a higher demand than the audience in your actual city. You’ll never know until you test!

H is for Headline

You’re a business owner, not a journalist. That doesn’t mean that headlines aren’t important to your company’s overall online performance. In fact, they are a crucial factor in determining whether your audience is understanding your message or not. Split testing different headlines in your ads is a great way to find out what works best.

I is for Impressions

Impressions are the number of eyes that have seen your ad. The higher the impressions, the better your chances of converting. Test one ad against another in your online advertising campaign to see who rakes in the most impressions.

J is for Jargon

Within every niche market, there is “jargon” or words that only the educated know in that field. For instance, in marketing, any one of these words in this article would be considered marketing jargon. 

But how does utilizing the jargon in your company’s market help your advertising? Jargon acts as a filter, allowing those who understand it to stick around and those who don’t to shy away. This naturally helps to specify your audience and help you understand what level they are on.

K is for Keywords

As related to the word above, utilizing certain keywords is super helpful in narrowing your audience when split testing. There are different types of online advertising as well, including search ads that are specifically based on the keywords that relate to your products and services. If you need help better understanding what a search ad is and how to launch and manage it, don’t hesitate to ask us about our Fresno online advertising services.

L is for Landing Pages

Landing pages are a key component in the sales funnel strategy, which means that if you create them in a not-so-beneficial way, they can hurt your sales. Split testing landing pages definitely pays off and the differences between your test A and test B don’t even have to be huge. Try adding a timer to one landing page while the other is exactly the same without a timer. Which performs better?

M is for Metrics

At the end of the day, it’s all about the numbers. What results are you truly getting? Metrics help marketers understand the effectiveness of campaigns by tracking measurable values. Metrics are the whole reason why we can understand split testing and why it’s so effective.

N is for Niche

A niche market is the subset of the market of which a particular product or service is focused. Split marketing helps you aim closer and closer into that subset by measuring which advertisement satisfies your audience’s needs. 

O is for Offer

“Make it irresistible!” That’s what you usually hear when trying to get advice about running the perfect ad, but how are you supposed to know what your audience finds irresistible? You guessed it: split testing different offers.

P is for Personas

Have you ever created a customer avatar (another word for customer persona)? If not, you basically create a “fake” ideal customer and describe this person in detail including demographics, interests, hobbies, etc. Many business owners don’t know how to start describing their ideal customer which is a problem for future marketing. Split testing can help companies get to know their customers and build out those personas.

Q is for Quality

This may come as a shock, but some people prefer that companies are more “raw and real” with them rather than “polished and perfect.” Depending on your ideal audience, running two different types of quality ads can result in interesting finds! This is especially true if you run a video ad. Some customers prefer raw, uncut phone video footage while others prefer a well-thought-out professional video.

R is for ROI

ROI stands for return on investment. As you can probably guess, it’s important to know this stat. Before any advertisements are run, business owners try to estimate their ROI to make sure that it’s worth the investment in the first place. We can tell you from experience that split testing has immeasurable (figuratively) and always profitable (literally) ROI because it’s about the knowledge gained at the end of the campaign plus the results produced.

S is for SEM

You’ve probably heard of SEO before, but many people don’t know about SEM, SMO, or SMM. Let’s break them down. SEO stands for search engine optimization which means that you’re using keywords and other strategies to help search engines recognize your company. SEM stands for search engine marketing which means that you’re paying search engines to run search ads. SMO stands for social media optimization which means that you’re improving your social profiles to boost offsite marketing efficiency. SMM stands for social media marketing which means that you’re utilizing social media to market your business, which can include paid advertising as well. 

Regardless, split testing can be applied to any of these strategies, but especially when it comes to SEM. Testing one search ad versus another is a smart marketing strategy that can be used to boost sales.

T is for Testimonials

Overall, the message of a testimonial is that a customer had a problem and you helped them solve it in an awesome way. However, different testimonials can reach different potential audience members. For instance, an older man’s testimonial vs. a middle-aged single mom’s testimonial will speak to two different audiences. Running a split test between two testimonial videos can help you better understand who some of your other ideal customers may be.

U is for Unique Visitor

A unique visitor is someone who visited your website for 30 minutes or more. This tells you as a business owner that they’re extremely interested in what you have on your site and potentially what you’re selling. Running a split test on ads and keeping an eye on the unique visitor metric can give you an idea if there were any really interested people that found your site because of that ad.

V is for Video Marketing

The attention span of a typical user spans less than 10 seconds. What are you going to do to grab those eyeballs before they move onto the next thing on their screen? Fresno video marketing is a great way to capture more impressions and in turn, boost conversions. Don’t believe us, test a video ad against a static ad and see which performs better.

W is for Webinar

There are a few ways to grow your lead list: phone, email, and even webinars. Although email costs next to nothing to generate, the conversions are no more than 1-3%. Depending on how large your list is, this can still be effective. 

Webinars, however, have a 42% registrant-to-attendee rate with a higher conversion rate. Not only can you split test this data for yourself, but you can split test the ads run to your webinar as well.

X is for XML Sitemap

There are different programs and resources that our digital marketing team can use to run a “rip” of your website and develop your XML sitemap. This will show us literally every single page on your website and also help us understand which ones are more popular than others. Understanding your XML sitemap is great knowledge to have before running your A/B testing ads so that you can send your customers to the most popular pages if you haven’t generated specific landing pages for your ads.

Y is for YouTube

As mentioned briefly earlier, video marketing is one of the best ways to capture your audience’s attention which explains why YouTube has performed so well as a whole. You can also run ads on YouTube and split test them as well. Every social platform is your split testing playground!

Z is for Zero Balance Account

Now, this may not be a “marketing” term, but it sure is a familiar term for business owners. Zero balance bank accounts (ZBAs) are checking accounts that are automatically set to be at zero balance. Funds are transferred from a master account only when checks are presented, just enough to cover those amounts each time. 

What does that have to do with A/B testing? Many business owners get nervous about having their business bank accounts tied to ad accounts in fear that the ad will run over or they will be charged incorrectly. Setting up a ZBA for your ad accounts may be a smart move for business owners so that they can closely monitor what is being spent on marketing efforts. Also, having a digital marketing team closely monitor ad spend and performance can take away the stress of running ads.

Ready to Run Your First A/B Split Test?

If you’re a business owner wanting to expand your business in the right direction and reach the right people, you need to run a few split tests. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. 

Our expert marketing team can give you direction and also relieve the stress that comes with ad management–we completely run the ad campaign for you and personally deliver monthly metric reports. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us to have your PPC advertising questions answered. We would be happy to help you!