This sample excel sheet outlines a straightforward process to completing an A/B split test to increase click-through rates (CTR). Split testing is a simple tool that can improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns and online pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. It’s a tool that can be used across all of your digital marketing initiatives.
You can use split testing to increase conversion rates on your website’s traffic or to improve your revenue as an online publisher.
A/B split tests are fairly easy to understand and just as easy to implement. Your control sample is the "A" portion of your test. This is your current email or PPC campaign as is without any changes.
You then make one change at a time and measure the impact of that change on CTR. However, it’s important that you only make one change at a time, and then measure the increase or decrease in CTR, before making additional changes.
This is where most individuals make mistakes. Instead of making a single change, they end up making two or more changes in one interval. Unfortunately, they are never able to pinpoint which of the changes lead to an increase or decrease in CTR. Instead, they are left to their own assumptions.
Example A/B Split Test
Let’s assume your company wants to improve the performance of a given email marketing campaign. Every single month, you send this email campaign to 10,000 email recipients or potential customers. Your focus is to increase your CTR and drive more traffic to your company’s website.
It’s important to note that you’ll also want to use an A/B split test to improve your website’s conversion rates. In this case, it’s not enough just to drive more traffic to your website by improving your CTR on email and PPC campaigns; you have to increase your conversion rates on those visits to truly benefit from your efforts.
Month #1:
Your first month is your email campaign as is with no changes. The layout below is exactly as you have it. With this current layout, you have 80 clicks generated from 10,000 email recipients or page views. You are starting with a CTR of 0.80%.
Month #2:
In your second month, you move the links to the “Product Promotions” down and the links to the “Inventory Liquidation” up. In doing this, you generate 100 clicks from 10,000 email recipients and see your CTR go up to 1.0%.
Month #3:
You’re still not satisfied and decide to make yet another change. This time you move the “Company Advertisement” upwards to just below the “Company Logo” and then move the “Contact Details: Phone Numbers“ down to the bottom. You are effectively switching their placements. This time you generate 150 clicks from 10,000 email recipients, thereby increasing your CTR to 1.50%.
Month #4:
Finally, you swap the “Industry Best Practices” with the “Product Promotions”. However, this time your CTR decreases as you only generate 140 clicks out of 10,000 email recipients. So, your CTR of 1.4% in the fourth month is a decline from the third month. Obviously, you would not continue with this change.
The excel table above summarizes all of these aforementioned steps. Now, this isn't the end of the testing. You should always try and increase CTR across all of your digital marketing and advertising plans.
This means using this simple test to improve the performance of individual online marketing plans, improving your website's layout, upgrading your company's blog, and or improving the performance of any other inbound lead generation tool.
Don't stop trying to improve the performance of your online marketing plans. In this example, we've merely played around with the placement of these advertising blocks or descriptions.
An A/B split test can also include testing different fonts, images, videos, backgrounds, and colors of links. Here is the sample A/B split test excel sheet. Download AB Split Test Sample Excel Sheet to Increase CTR on Email Campaigns PPC Campaigns and Websites
