Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Deciding What to Test

While your benchmarketing experiment is running, you can return to your website and make a list of elements you want to test. After you know the conversion rate that you're trying to beat, you'll be able to evaluate and act on the results of all subsequent tests.

Here's the problem: Your landing page consists of dozens of different elements — headlines, subheads, body copy, navigation bars, images, fonts, color schemes, and on and on — and each can be changed in practically infinite ways. If you were to test each element randomly, you'd feel like a monkey at a keyboard aiming to produce King Lear. It would take forever, you'd have no guarantee of ever getting there, and you'd develop a nasty case of simian carpal tunnel syndrome.

And, you've already created the best site you could build. So where can you go for new ideas?

Testing Principle #1: Start big, get smaller

In Chapter 13, you see some examples of very tiny changes in ad copy that lead to very different results. We've seen the addition of a comma increased CTR four times! So you might think that similar small changes would work for site testing as well. Generally, though, they don't. Instead, go for giant differences. That way, you'll get clearer results faster.

For example, you may want to find out whether your visitors will respond better to a video or a still image at the top of the page. That's a big difference. Do they prefer a short page or a long page? A professional-looking site or one that ...