So why don t most of us test? Basically there are four reasons:

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1 Hi this is Don Crowther. In this video I d like to talk about one of the top five mistakes that online marketers make and this one is deadly. Very simply, it s not testing. Now you should know that if you are not testing, this is the equivalent of opening your windows wide in the middle of a 40 0 below blizzard. Now you are not actively throwing money out the window but it s the equivalent of money just being thrown out the window. So why don t most of us test? Basically there are four reasons: 1. The first one is we don t believe it s worth the effort. Somehow we think that, oh it s not that big a deal if I don t test, I m not losing all that much.

2 2. The second one is very related to that and that is you feel like I m good, I don t need to test. 3. Third reason is that in the past it has tended to be very complicated and difficult. 4. And then the fourth one is, I don t know what to test. Let s spend just a couple of minutes and go through each one of these reasons because it s very important that we understand each one of those-- and that we understand that each one of those is overcome-able so that we can be testing in a serious way. First off, let me give you several examples of situations that I ve either done directly or I have been a consultant in that case and done it with a particular client. So the first example in a launch situation, we made one headline change on a launch video resulting in a 21% increase in sales $163,800 more on our bottom line. And here s the interesting thing. That entire test took about 60 minutes to run because we had so much traffic coming in. 60 minutes of running one single test, $163,800 more in our back pocket. Not bad. that one single test. Here s another one. I was working with a client where we had a multi-step checkout process in the cart. All we did was remove one step from that checkout process. That resulted in $1.1 million more in the first year alone. The effects of that test have now run for 10 years. That s $11 million more that this client has made as a result of running Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 2

3 Here s another example. We changed a link from the bottom of a page into the top navigation bar. In other words, we made it much more prominent, made it much more important in the site. Net results: $1.8 million more in the first year, 5 years that s about $10 million more that has been made as a result of that single testing change. And by the way that was a change that nobody in the company thought was that important. That s the reason why it was in the bottom of the page instead of up at the top. Finally, an example where we increased price by 23% resulted in $125,000 more the first year. Now you look at those number and say, I am so far out of this ballpark there s no way that any of this applies to me. It s not all that important. Well let s just do some math on a much more reasonable level for all of us. Let s assume for a moment that you have a site that gets 10,000 visitors per month. That site converts people at a 0.5 conversion rate. In other words, 1 out of every 200 people who come to that site buy, and they are buying a $97 product. So this means you are making $4,850 per month from this particular portion of your site. Not bad $4,850 per month. Well let s just imagine that we did a test. We changed none of the other numbers except we took the conversion rate from 0.5 to So we did a 50% increase in conversion. So now instead of 1 out of every 200 people who came to the site it was 1 out of every 150 people who came to the site. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 3

4 What this means is that instead of selling $4,850 per month you are now selling $7,275. That s an increase of $2,425 per month which translates across 12 months is $29,100 more in your back pocket every single year. That s more than most people make in a year. But let s keep doing the math for just one second. Let s look at that same site s opt-in. We re getting 10,000 visitors per month, with 10% of those people who come opting-in to our site and opt-ins are worth about $0.25 per month. So you are selling them maybe other people s affiliate programs, maybe you are selling some more of your programs, maybe you ve got a coaching program. But very conservatively, we are figuring that this traffic, these opt-ins are worth $0.25 more for you per month for each person who opts in. Very reasonable assumption, that s what I get on a regular basis or significantly higher than that. And let s assume that when people come and opt-in and get on your list that they are on there for a period of six months. I m being very conservative in all these estimates. What that means is 10,000 x 10% x 25% x 6 months your opt-ins are currently making you $18,000 per year. What if we could get more opt-ins? What would that mean to you? Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 4

5 So let s assume and I ve done this many, many times to my tests, that we do a set of changes and that set of changes results in a 20% opt-in rate instead of 10%. What that means is instead of getting $18,000 per year out of your list you are now getting $36,000 out of your list, an increase of $18,000 per year. couple of months of testing. So just by testing you have increased your direct sales by $29,100. You ve increased your sales to your list by $18,000. And now by running a couple of months worth of testing you have increased your total income by $47,100. So you ve come from a very respectable $76,200 to $123,000. You are now, in America, classified as, rich. All for a And here s what the real cool thing is, that costs you nothing more. Other than maybe $49 or $129 a month to have the testing software there s no real increase in costs, just getting more revenue from the exact same number of people who were coming to your site before. How would you like $47,100 more in revenue? How would you like $1.1 million, $1.8 million like the other tests that I have shown you? You can do this and it s very easy. So let s go back to the reason why everyone doesn t test. We talked about people not believing it s worth the effort. I think the numbers I ve just shown you show that it is definitely worth the effort. So the second one is there s a lot of people say, I m good I don t need to test; I really have a good feeling for my audience. Well here s Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 5

6 what I discovered. I have found that I m wrong at least 20% of the time. So every time I do a test I sit down ahead and I say here s the one that I think is going to win. And what I find is four out of five times I m right. But one out of five times I m wrong. And oftentimes that results from that not only increases sales it could double sales or quadruple sales or ten times my sales. And so if I wasn t testing, if I was assuming that hey, I know my marketplace very well I don t need to test I m leaving money on the table. And even the very best marketers in the world are wrong at least one out of every 10 times. Most of them are wrong one out of every five times and the average person I ve found is wrong about two thirds of the time. So let s continue on, why doesn t everybody test? We ve talked about two of them. The third one is that it tends to be complicated and difficult. which is now my favorite testing tool. That was true, very true, until a short while ago. It was very difficult to run tests. You had to buy very expensive software that software oftentimes fell up your search engine rankings it was very complex from a programming point of view. Well all that has been now resolved with a very cool new tool which is called Visual Website Optimizer Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 6

7 And basically if you go to I ll have a link directly to that and I ll make sure I try to find out the best link that we possibly can and I ll keep that updated with whatever is their best deal. So Visual Website Optimizer, now you may say oh this has got to be expensive. Well actually it s not. If you look at this second column over, you can pay $49 a month, get 10,000 people to a testing page in a month. If you want to test a little bit faster you can pay $129 a month get 30,000 people a month coming to a particular testing page. I know it s a lot of money, but it s not much money at all when you consider $47,000 in a very reasonable case is what you could make. So don t be penny wise pound foolish. Go out and invest to build it. Now Visual Website Optimizer gives you the ability to run multiple sets, to run on multiple sites and to run different kinds of tests all at the same time. I m not going to go into this in a lot of detail but I will tell you that the real beauty of this is that you literally click and type to make changes. So you just go to where you want the test to occur so let s say you are testing your opt-in box. You go there, you click and you type and you can see the changes right there and then what this program does is this. When you say I m done it automatically shows different versions of the page, different people as they come through. So it says okay this person is going to get the base case and then this person is going to get version A and this person is going to get version B. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 7

8 And it just rotates those around and what it does is it doesn t foul up your SEO and here s the real cool thing; when the test is done it stops. And automatically shows everybody the best result from then on. And so you don t have to worry that you might get distracted and keep running a bad test for longer than you need to. So let me show you how all of this works and do a demonstration right here on my computer. Once you ve got Visual Website Optimizer set up and logged in you can go in and create a test, you can view reports and manage your account. Let s go ahead and create a test. Here you ve got three different testing versions. The first one is an AB Test. This is what you are going to use most of the time. Basically it says person A sees version A, person B sees version B, person C sees version C and you are only testing one variable at a time across those three so you are changing that one thing; your optin box, your headline. Next is what s called the Multi-Variant Test. This is when you are looking at several different changes and the impact trying to come up with a solution that is best overall. So let s say that you are changing the color of your background, your headline and your opt-in box. What s the combination of those that gets the best results? The challenge of a multi-variant test is it takes a lot of traffic to complete a multivariant test and secondly is that it has a little more advanced statistics to run them. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 8

9 The third thing is a Split URL Test. So this one sends person A to URL A, person B to URL B, person C to URL C. This is most valuable when you are doing something like a total graphics change. So it s not just one thing that you are changing, you are changing lots of stuff that s a good way of doing that using a Split URL Test. Most cases as I said you are going to use the AB Test. You can scroll down you can also do a hit map and a click map which shows where people actually click on your site, conversion tracking, measures some conversion kinds of factors, these are not testing it s just other things offered by Visual Website Optimizer. So once you click on Creating AB Test the next step is you are taken to this page where you enter in the URL of the page that you are going to test right here and then you click Create Test. That takes you to this page and you are able to make changes to it. Notice how there s a blue box moving around as I move around within it. This is defining Edit areas. I m going to work right here on this Edit Your For Free Access section. I click on it, I click on Edit and it brings up a box where I can make changes to that particular test. I am going to now enter in a headline to go above that and I am going to make that headline, Watch This Video Now, I m going to make that red to match this red area arrow. So I m going to hit Preview and notice how it puts that Watch This Video Now Enter Your For Free Access Notification from there. And then all I had to do is click Save and I have now created that test block. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 9

10 Now every once in a while Visual Website Optimizer does weird things and so then you just go in and look at it and in this case I m going to remove this right here so that it looks the same as a control. So now I want to test one other headline here. So I am simply going to click on the plus sign and what that will do is create a new variation and it copies it. And so now I m just going to go to Watch This Video Now, I m going to change it from Watch to Get. Click Preview, drag it over notice that it s there. It s doing this weird thing again I m going to click Save and so now I just have to come in here and remove it. And this happens every once in a while, you realize there s lots going on in these kinds of programs. So now I actually have a control and two separate variations. Click on Next Step and here s where you select what are called the Conversion Goals. In other words how will Visual Website Optimizer know that someone completed the action you want them to do? You could leave this as Goal 1, I m just going to put it in as opt-in goal and it triggers when a visitor in this case visits a page and so then here I ll put in the URL of the Thank You page for this particular opt-in so then Visual Website Optimizer will know when it sees that Thank You page happen it knows that a conversion has happened. Once I put that in I click Next. On this page you are able to give yourself some more information as well as further define the test. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 10

11 And so this is Test Number 24 here I m going to put Test two New Headlines for Opt-In and here s the URL they are happening on. I m doing this right now on the 100% of the visitors to this. You can take that down to 10% if you only want to test a small percentage of the visitors. I like to get my tests done very quickly. You also then can say what kind of segment do you want to have. Notice you can hold your cursor over the question mark and get more information. So you do have the ability to do something like you can say the referring URL or search keywords or cookie value or day of the week, hour of the day. Lots of different things you can use to change this so you do it slightly differently at different times depending on whether it comes from Google, whether it comes from AdWords whatever it is that you want to do. In this case I m just going to leave it open for all traffic that comes in. I suggest you turn on the hit map for the test and if you happen to have multiple domains like something is going off to a shopping cart or something like that you would check this box here and then I suggest you turn on Automatically Show Winner to All Visitors. So that way when your test is statistically significant it will automatically turn on the winner so you don t lose a bunch of potential winning traffic because you got distracted or were out of town or whatever it is. And so then click on Create Your Test and you are basically done. Here s where it gives you the code to actually put it and so you ve got the code right here. You ll put this up and it gives you instructions on how to do it and even where to do it, you put it in the head tag. And so you can either copy and paste this into your code or if you want to just hit Send to Developer it will it to them and then they can take care of that for you and it will just get resolved. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 11

12 You can preview and I always suggest you do this and so you can see the different version down here, be able to click on them and make sure that each one of those versions is exactly what you want and then you are done with the test. You click Start Test Now and it s off and running. Again any time you want to you can simply go and look at the results of the test so far. Here s a test where the control had only generated a.33% conversion of that particular goal. My variation was 1.45% which is a 339% increase at a 96% probability that it is better than the control. So right now, one simple test literally took me eight minutes to set that test up, has already go me a 339% increase. Now the job is make this variation the control and go test other things to get better than that. And then you also have the ability to see a nice graph to show the difference between the two and you can see it s automatically turned off the control at this point because it knows that the variation is so much better than the control one. That s how it works; very easy, very quick and strongly recommended that you do this. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 12

13 So now how do you read your test results? At the end of a Visual Website Optimizer test, actually all the way through it, you get very clear results that show you which version has won and what the progress is and you can actually set it so that when the test is done it will automatically stop and replace all of the other pages with the version that is performing the best. And so you can go on vacation for a couple of weeks with the test running and it will just automatically replace it when it is there. So it s no longer complicated it s no longer difficult it s no longer expensive. Just get that tool and it does amazing things. I m not here to try to sell that tool. I m just simply saying this is a great tool. It works really well, I recommend it, I suggest you go get it. So back to our reasons why everybody doesn t test we ve talked about the first three let s talkabout the fourth one which is, I don t know what to test. So what should you test? I recommend that you work with the rule where you are looking for 20% of the things that will give you 80% of the results. Let me tell you what those are. Basically there are four places that you should focus on your testing that I have found give the 80% of the results. The first one is to test everything that s above the fold on your page. What you are trying to do is keep people on your site. Now if you go and look at analytics you ll probably find that on your Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 13

14 average page somewhere between 60 and 95% of everyone who comes to that page leaves never going on to another page. And oftentimes they leave in a matter of seconds. results in the end. Well what s happening there is your copy that is above the fold in other words without people having to scroll down is not good enough to hold their attention. And so by testing the different elements that are above the fold, you can then keep people on your page for longer, cause them to click through the other pages and get better The second thing is your offer. Whatever it is that you are selling, giving away, whatever it is that you are trying to do look very carefully at that offer and the different elements of it. And I m going to take you through each one of these in just a moment. The third thing is your opt-in. Opt-ins are so key that you want to be absolutely optimizing and maximizing the number of people who opt in to your site when they come. And then the fourth thing is your checkout process. So let s go through each one of those before we do let s recognize for just a moment something very important. And that is that testing is done page by page not for your site as a whole. And so oftentimes people get caught up in the, oh this is how much traffic that gets to your site. Testing is not done that way as web traffic doesn t happen that way. People come to a page not to a site. You need to optimize each individual page. My recommendation is you start with your highest traffic pages and start optimizing those. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 14

15 So let s talk about above the fold. So above the fold means what most people see when they come to your page and in just a moment I m going to show you a tool that will allow you to do that. Before they scroll down what they initially see. So most pages lose 70% or more visitors without ever going to another page. Your job is to keep them there and move them through your site. So what are some of the above the fold elements you should be testing? Well the first thing you should be testing is your headline and your subheads. Many people don t have headlines on their websites. That s a serious mistake. Have headlines even if it s just the title of the blog post that s a headline. Work on that and they ll hold more people there. The second one is images above the fold. What we have found is the better those images and in some cases the more of those images the better your site tends to test. Rule of thumb but it tends to be true. And you should also be looking at the copy and image ratio. So one of the mistakes that I consistently find is I find sites with very large top bars. A banner bar running across the top which, if someone has a small screen, they are only seeing very small amount of content on the site. By shrinking that top bar down and therefore raising the content on the site you are able to get significantly better results. Third thing here s what you offer why pay attention to you why buy from you? Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 15

16 In other words I find especially on home pages, home pages tend to test very well if right upfront you tell them who you are, what you offer and why they should buy from you. A lot of people come to a website, they see it and they go okay there s stuff on here but I don t know why I should pay attention to this particular site. The next key element you should be experimenting in, in the rule is your offer. So your offer is the combination of the package that you are selling to someone whether it s a service or a product or even ad clicks on your site. So things like your price, your guarantee, where the guarantee is placed, what the guarantee actually says, how it s structured, the color behind the guarantee box, do you put a kind of guarantee border around it? How close do you put that to the Buy button, do you repeat it a couple of times? All those are testable factors and they are all part of the offer as such. Next is any bonuses, so a lot of people really love to feel like they are getting something for free and so a great way to build your sales is to add some bonuses. In fact many people try to make their bonuses worth the price of the course itself. Because then people feel like they are getting great value in addition to what they are paying for. Next is payment plans. So a lot of people may not be able to afford whatever it is that you are charging. If you give them the option to pay over three or six months they can be able to afford that and they know that this reduces the risk to them. Speaking of reducing risk there s a concept of trust elements; what are you doing to help people to trust you? So there are little trust boxes and things like that that have been proven in many cases to increase sales and you should be testing these. Finally, social proof things like testimonials, videos with people telling about how much they love working with you or how your product has helped them to achieve the results that they are after. All of these things are part of the offer that can help you and are key pieces that you should be testing. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 16

17 Third thing is the opt-in. Opt-ins are so important that you increase your number of opt-ins and you mail to them effectively. And so you should be looking at what is your opt-in offer? So what are you offering them to opt into your site? Next is what proof are you giving them that this opt-in offer is worthwhile to them? Third thing, what about your privacy guarantee and a link to your privacy guarantee policy? It s very interesting a lot of people think that s not important. I have found that to be very, very important in nailing down the number of people who opt in. People like to see a privacy guarantee there. Next is what you ask for in your opt-in. I oftentimes will find, especially in the B to B world, people asking for their name, their address, their phone number, how big their company is, how many employees they have, how much they spend in this particular category every year. That kills opt-ins. And so you should be experimenting but what you ask for in the opt-in process. And then I like to actually include a second level of opt-ins where you get initially their name and address and then you give them an option to get an additional set of bonuses if they ll give you some additional information. That s how you can get those things like the address and company size or whatever. absolutely key. The fourth area of things to focus on is your checkout page. Basically this is a process of checking out everything from hitting the Buy button on. And so this has to do with number of pages to finish. So every time you take them to another page in the checkout process you are going to lose people if you focus that into a single page or two pages, Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 17

18 Next, this is the absolute killer is shipping costs. Many people click on the Buy button, they get to the shipping costs and they say I can t afford that or I m running down to the local store to get it because those shipping costs are so high. And so the earlier you can reveal the shipping costs in the process of buying, in fact if you can actually reveal the shipping costs as they are deciding whether they are going to add it to the cost you tend to increase your results. Next is payment methods. So are you taking all the different credit cards? Are you taking AmEx, are you taking PayPal? Do you give people the option to buy in many different ways? If you are selling outside of the United States are you using some of the other international PayPal kinds of products? What about up-sells? You should be looking at whether or not you should be offering up-sells, what up-sells are the right ones and when and how you offer those up-sells because that will affect your sales portion. Finally, trust elements. Again, trust boxes. This site is proven to not be a spammer, whatever it is, all the different trust boxes that you can get out there those are all things you should be testing in your checkout process. Now realize there s one other factor that is harder to test but it is key and that is this, my testing over and over and over again shows that the overall professionalism and attractiveness of your site has a significant effect on the amount of sales that you ll get and the amount of people sticking around when they come to your site. The challenge with that is that tends to violate one of the key rules of testing which I m going to mention to you in a moment. So basically what you have to do when you are looking at the site appearance change is you basically have to test here s this look versus here s this look. And so you are changing oftentimes many different Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 18

19 variables at the same time and see what happens. So you are purposefully violating a testing rule as you go through that process which brings up that key testing rule which is, only test one thing at a time. So perhaps if you are working on opt-in box, test three different versions of the offer that you are giving. But you shouldn t test a version of the offer and how many different facts you are asking for from the person. Or maybe the placement of the offer and how many because every time you add an additional variable in it, it not only fouls up your test results but it doesn t allow you to know what change created that result. And so the best thing to do is to test one thing at a time. Now you can test multiple different versions of that one thing. So you may have three different versions of your opt-in box all being tested at the same time. But only test one factor across those three different things. You are testing one thing at a time. All right, so you ve learned a lot about testing here. You ve learned that it is easy you ve definitely learned that it is worth it and you ve learned what to test. So what s our action plan? I want you to go out and make some money. I don t want you just to watch this and throw it away I want you to go out and take action so I m going to give you a multistep action plan here. The first thing is go identify the five most popular pages on your website. Easy to do, just go onto your analytics and go grab the top five pages. Those five become your testing pages. That s where your existing traffic is going, start your testing there. That way you don t have to go drive a bunch of traffic to an additional page, you ve already got existing traffic. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 19

20 logo? Second thing, print each one of those five pages out and then draw lines on them so that you can see what s above the fold. And you say, how do I know what s above the fold? Here s a little tool, it s What that does is it enables you to put a URL up at the top, see next to the Google There s a place I ve put in And what this does is it shows you the percentage of people that can see within each one of those bars. And so you can see the purple bar 99% of everyone who comes to that website can see that amount. 98% can see the next green box, 95% can see the orange and so you can see it going down. And so take this and once you ve printed it out run each one of your pages through this particular tool and then I recommend you draw lines at 95%, 90%, 80%, 70% and 50%. So that will show you, different colored lines for each one, that will show you what s above the fold for 80% of everyone who comes to your site or 90% that way that showing you. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 20

21 These are key things to test because things are the things above the fold for that particular page, now not that you only test things above the fold. But that s a 20% rule valuable content for you to be testing. Third step in your action plan. Based on what you see, develop a short list of things you believe you should test. And I recommend that you go after the low hanging fruit. So just looking at that one browser map I realize something I need to test that I ve never tested before. That s a low hanging fruit that you should definitely go after. Go back and look at the things that I ve talked to you about what you should be testing and put those things into action. Then go develop a testing plan. Here s what I m going to do I m going to start by testing my opt-in box, my headline. Whatever it is say this is the thing that I m going to test. I m going to show you a form in just a moment that will help you to develop and track that plan. But develop that testing plan. This is what we are going to test first because we think it s the lowest hanging fruit then second, third, fourth etc. Next, create and start a test. So go pick up a copy of Visual Website Optimizer, go in there and set up a test. Very easy, very quick you can probably be done with setting up a test in less than 30 minutes. Let that test run. And it may take a couple of weeks, it may take a couple of days depending on how much traffic you have coming to that particular page. Go back and track it everyday just see how it s doing, see how fast you are gathering these people, see how close you are to achieving significance. Then once you finally get to the point where that test is finished you want to record and track your results. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 21

22 Now I recommend you actually print out and put in a book the results. I m going to give you a page in just a moment that you can do that with that will enable you to do this. Because what will happen is months from now you are going to be looking at it, you ll have made some significant progress in your testing plan but you may have forgotten or maybe a new employee comes in and you want them to see all the tests that you ve done. You hand them a book and see every test that you ve done exactly what the results were, exactly what the hypothesis was, exactly what won, exactly what the longterm results of that will be. And even the accumulative results that you are gathering over time. And so I suggest you keep them physically in a book to be able to do that. Then once you get that test done turn around and test your next low hanging fruit element. Your aim in doing all this is to have at all times at least 1 to 10 tests running on every site that you have. Don t forget in addition to testing your website presence you should be testing your s. So how much selling do you do in your s? How many s, how close together, how long in the sequence before you give them something that tries to give them a hard sell? All these things are testing elements whether you should have pictures in your s or not, all these things should be tested. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 22

23 You should be testing your advertising so you should be testing for example Pay Per Click advertising, driving people into your website. You should be testing your methods. So maybe you have as one of your objectives to get a lot of people to publish guest blog posts. And so you should be testing what s the best way to approach other bloggers. Keep track of which methods you use so you can refine that and come up with better methods over time. Basically you are wanting to have a testing mindset. That mindset says, I can always get better but to get better I must actively test and tracking of those tests is key. So let me give you a couple of those tools to help you in your website testing process. The first one is Visual Website Optimizer, as we ve discussed. Here is your URL to be able to get to that Then I m also giving you a testing tracking form. This is gold. I use this one constantly or different variations of this over time. Here s what basically this is and I m giving you a copy of this in Word, I m giving you a PDF version. You can take and use it however you wish so you can be able to do it. So let me walk through this form and show it to you in a lot more detail. Okay the top part of the form starts looking at a test number. I like to number every one of my tests. I just number them sequentially test 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 that way I can then do an index of the number so I know later on I can go back very quickly and find that test number, the date you implemented it, the paid URL. So what page are you testing in this particular thing and if you are doing site-wide let s say you are doing something in the navigational bar and it goes site-wide then you can put the entire site. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 23

24 Your traffic methods, so in most cases it s whatever your existing traffic is. So if your traffic method is existing that s great. If you are going to go out and buy ads, drive a bunch of traffic because you want to get the results really quickly then you may want to put Adwords or Banner ads or whatever it is. The date your test was finished, so at the end of it you fill that in. Then what elements were you testing? What were you actually focusing on; the opt-in box, the headline, the picture, the top banner bar whatever it is. Next is your hypothesis. Go back into high school show what your hypothesis is, this is my best guess of what the results are going to be. And so what I ll oftentimes do is I ll say my hypothesis is I ve got too many words in my opt-in box. By reducing those words I think I can increase my conversion rate. Then what I also say is I think test version two is going to win. That s really key because this will help you to calibrate and start to know how accurate you are in your testing guesses and your testing results. Next section down is your test content. I recommend you summarize it below and then actually paste in screenshots for the record. So you can actually see exactly what you did. So, on the left side I include the control cell so here s the way it is the base and then I put in each one of the test cells. And you can do just one test cell, you can do four, you can do six. Whatever it is you can go ahead and change this form however you want to make it work for you. But this is where I summarize for the record, what I was actually testing. And then what I like to do is actually include screenshots of each one of those test cells down below so that I print it out for the record and two years from now I can go back and look at it and say oh yeah, I did test that thing. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 24

25 Alright, next you record the test results. So if your measurement is opt-ins so then you would record at the end of your test you ve run the test now and you put down okay the first one got a 23% opt-in, the second one got 26%, the third one got a 50%, the fourth one got a 21%. And then the next line down is the significance level. So that is significant 99%, the 95%, the 93%, the 90%, the 80% whatever it is. You put them across and what will happen is what I like to do is when I get all done with that I take whichever one is a winner, I put it a bright yellow background behind it. That way I know which one actually won and it s easy to see as I go back and look at them. Then the bottom part of this is the actions that you take as a result of doing this. So the first one is what s the action taken? Usually that s replaced the control with test cell 1. Then you say because oftentimes what ends up happening is you come out of a test is that you realize that something else should probably be tested. And so what I put down is a future testing plan. So any insights I got out of reading the results to that test I put down there as this is something I want to test in the future. It may not be the next low hanging fruit thing but that does quantify and record for me and for other employees and for the plan this is something else I want to focus on in the future. Then I estimate my test return so if I have found that by taking a step out of the checkout process my orders actually increase by 10%. Then I take my cells for the year. I take that and I say okay it was $10,000, 10% increase is $1,000 more therefore this test results is going to make me $1,000 more. Then the key to the test results. You take all the tests you ve done so far and you simply add $1,000 to Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 25

26 it. So you ve done tests that have resulted in $23,000 you now add $1,000 more you ve got $24,000. What that does is it makes it very easy for you to see. Hey we ve made $24,000 more as a result of the testing work that I have done. That makes it much easier to justify continuing testing. And then down at the bottom I ve put in notes so if something weird happened during the period of the test just anything that I might need or want to know about in the future that goes in the Notes section. Just in case. So to summarize; testing is absolutely key to your business success and to your future. Testing is easy and it s cheap. And testing has lifetime value. Actually that s something I haven t talked much about. Recognize that any time you do a test and you make a change that test not only is valid for the traffic you are going to get that next month but it potentially could be valuable for the next five to ten years. And so every time you make an improvement you are consistently adding upon the improvements of the past and you ve got a compound effect that tends to significantly increase your curves and making more and more as time goes on. Continuing on with the summary there are multiple things you should be testing. You should constantly be testing and tracking and tests is absolutely key if you want to succeed in the long-term. Testing is worth it, testing is easy and testing is something you can and should be doing. I hope you found this to be valuable, to help you in that process. This is Don Crowther. Just go do this stuff. Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 26

27 For more information on how to put more profits on your bottom line via Internet Marketing, visit And, to receive 21 powerful Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing videos, visit and sign up for the newsletter there. Enjoy! Don Crowther Copyright 2012, Breakthrough Consulting Inc. 27