When talking about the secret of pay per click advertising, a thing one has to do is split (A/B) or multi-variate test their landing pages. But what a landing page is? According to wikipedia, a landing page defines as:

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page will also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can measure advertisement effectiveness based on relative click-through rates.

But now what is A/B testing or multivariate testing?

A/B or split testing

In this set up, basically you have 2 versions of your landing page with a slight variations on the pages. The most common variations perhaps are the page headline, and the P.s. attached at the end of the page. The reasons are there are most read by your visitors and there are places where statistically proven affect your conversion in a great deal.

Multivariate testing

While A/B testing you will only test a single element, in multivariate testing you will test different elements on a single page in a given time. However, as a general rule of thumb, you will only apply multivariate testing if the page is receiving 1,000 or more page views per week.

The purposes of multi-variate or split testing are simple they are there to test how well you improve your sales or email newsletter sign up conversion. This is important because as an advertiser you want to get every bit of your every advertising dollar spent so how do you set up such a testing?

Setting Up testing environment

This article assumes you are using >Google Adwords. If you haven’t signed up, you can signed up at the link above. Ok, now to set up a test you need to have the following ready:

1. At least two versions of your landing page
2. Your conversion page (thank for purchasing, subscribing page)

After you’ve got this ready, you need to login to your adwords account and set up the Google website optimizier.

Later on I’ll show you how to set up the Google optimizer so please stay tuned.