“Split testing” is a marketing technique which helps you to improve the conversion rate on your web pages. It’s an established technique in the “real” world, but the web makes it much easier to use.

Basically, you set up two versions of a page with just one element changed.. say, the headline. You then use split test software which sends visitors alternately to the two pages. After you’ve had a reasonable number of visits, you can compare the conversion rates of the two pages and see which headline worked best.

I’ve experimented with the process a few times, but it’s quite time consuming. So I was interested to get an email from a guy called Ryan Deiss, who is giving away the results of 43 split tests that he’s carried out if you take up a $97 monthly membership (his “Total Access Club”). I’m not endorsing this because I haven’t tried it.

However, in his email, Ryan gives the result of one of his split tests.. the text on the “buy” button - the one you hit when you’ve read the sales page and want to make a purchase.

Ryan ran 8 variations of the text and tested the results on over 80,000 page views. The winner, by a big margin was “Add To Cart”, which outperformed the others by a factor of 20 times.

I’ve certainly noticed that more and more sales pages are using “Add To Cart” - even though no online shopping cart is being used.

I guess I’m going to have to start converting all those buttons on my sales pages. And maybe you, too, might want to experiment with this.