Testing:

In the real world Testing is defined as “the process of trying to discover every feasible fault or weakness in a work/product”.

In Internet marketing Testing is mainly the process of letting the two versions of a sales letter or an ad where only one detail was changed run against each other for 30 to 100 visitors and finding out which of the two version performs better, i.e. makes more or less sales, has higher or lower click through rates, provides more opt-ins or less etc. This is generally referred to as Split Testing.

For example you could setup an AdWords campaign for an ebook on Internet marketing and create two ads, one with the headline “Discover the Secrets…” and the other with “Learn the Secrets…” Otherwise the ads would be identical. Both ads would be shown alternately for 100 ad impressions and you might find out from your AdWords statistics that the “Discover” ad got a click-through-rate of 2.3% whereas “Learn” got only 1.7%. You would then keep “Discover” and discard “Learn” and you would then test another variation of the “Discover” ad like two variations of the ad text with the same headline.

Obviously there would be no end to this process because theoretically one can always improve. But there can certainly be a point where the marketer would be happy with the optimized result and leave it at that.

There is basically no limit to what features in a sales copy or website can be changed and tested. Headlines, font color, font size, background color, the position of graphics within the whole layout, replacing single words or phrases with synonyms, the size of the “Order Now” button and so on.

An inexperienced marketer might ask the question why undergo so much work for sometimes so minute improvements. The answer is simple: If you sell a $50 product and through Testing you find a version B of your sales letter which converts to 3% where version A only converted to 2%. For 100 visitors this makes an income difference of $50, for 1000 visitors $500, for 10.000 visitors $5000. If you have to pay for your traffic this 1% difference might well be the deciding factor if you earn money or lose money.

[Test comes from Latin testum = earthen pot (in which metals could be melted. Thereby the quality of the metal could be verified)]

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