Ways To Improve CTR With Split-Testing

Maximizing your clickthrough rates (CTR) with Google Adwords can help you create the most cost-effective strategy in your marketing efforts, and there are several ways to get started. Perry Marshall, an internet marketing pioneer and Google Adwords educator, encourages marketers to employ a split testing strategy to monitor and track results. Split testing helps you determine what specific keywords and keyphrases work particularly well for your target market, and running two or more ads at a time can help you steadily increase your click through rate and help you understand what your ideal customer's key needs, wants and desires.

Along with split testing your AdWords ads, you can also apply this strategy to other facets of your online marketing. Here are just a few of the situations in which a split test can help to maximize your online marketing campaign's ability to attract potential customers.

1. Sign-up forms. If you're advertising online, it's a good bet that you're collecting customers' Email addresses and possibly other information, whether it be for a weekly or monthly newsletter or simply a one-time free download. Whatever the case, monitoring these areas can help you to understand what freebies really attract customers and why, and by further split testing the copy around these forms, you can gain knowledge about what specific wordings motivate customers to sign up.

2. The shopping cart. When individuals are shopping online, you can learn a great deal from the way in which they behave on the "shopping cart" page. You can take a variety of approaches to monitoring this ease of your site. In addition to watching what keywords and keyphrases are most effective in encouraging customers to explore your site and make purchases, you can also look into which specific items are being searched most frequently. You can also try split testing by using different messages in your check out area, and seeing if different wordings can drive your customers to make further purchases.

3. Product-specific pages. Every product you sell on your site will have its own page, and each of these pages represents a great opportunity for marketing. Don't discount the importance of the copy on an individual product's page on a customer's ultimate decision to buy or not to buy. Attention-grabbing copy in this area can indeed work wonders in increasing sales. This is also a great place to employee the strategy of split testing - vary the messages presented to customers on your site's product-specific pages, and be sure to note which particular messages seem to prompt the most sales As mentioned above, the insights gained here can easily be applied to AdWords ads.

4. Your sales letter. Sales letters continue to be an effective marketing tool because they're designed to elicit an immediate response. Tracking different sales letter messages is another way to monitor your customers' behavior and find out which key messages they respond well to; a click through to your product page or purchasing section means that your message was right on target. Capture that and use it for Google Adwords ad and other online advertising to maximize your efforts.

5. Email newsletters. From automatic responses to entire newsletters, its likely that you're sending a good deal of Email to customers. Any one of these messages to customers affords you an opportunity to conduct long-term testing on what key messages really interest your audience.