Split testing is what marketing is all about; right? Wrong! There is a much better way to get the answer to 95% of the kinds of questions you might consider split testing. Let’s step through it.

First of all, you must decide your desired outcome. Is it profitability? Is it search engine ranking? Is it more traffic? Is it more inbound links?

Once you have decided your desired outcome, you must find a way that OTHER PEOPLE’S sites can be measured for that outcome.

That’s right; I’m not advocating split testing because there is a much faster and even more accurate way to get the same results by simply looking at the results of OTHER PEOPLE!

It’s called statistical analysis. It’s what most scientific advancements have been based on! When you go to the doctor, does he split test antibiotics and exercise on you? Of course not! You would fire him immediately. Instead, he looks at the results of studies where other people had the same desired outcome you want (getting rid of that fever, cough, whatever) and prescribes the drug or treatment that was proven safe and effective for a statistically significant number of OTHER PEOPLE!

Will it always work for you because it worked on a statistically significant number of OTHER PEOPLE? No; of course not. But it will work a majority of the time. The fact is that split testing has the same problems. When you find an answer from split testing and choose the “a” version over the “b” version based on 20 actions… There is a percentage chance that you actually chose the wrong version. Increase the number of actions and you increase your chances of picking the right one. The same is true when looking at OTHER PEOPLE’S results instead of your own.

OK; so how can we measure some of these things. Search Engine Ranking is easy. You can compare sites at the #1 ranking with sites at the #100 ranking…. or sites in the top 10 with sites in the 101-110 range in ranking. No problem.

More traffic? You can find open logs for a statistically significant number of sites. A less perfect measurement might be Alexa or Jupiter ratings. When dealing with less accurate measurements like that, simply increase your sample size or compare more distant extremes (Alexa rankings in the top 100 vs Alexa ranking in the 99,900-100,000 traffic rankings).

More inbound links? Once again you can use open logs and look at referral entries… or you can trust the link: command at MSN… or something less reliable like the link: command at Google (once again, just increase your sample size and/or compare more distant extremes in number of inbound links).

How about profitability? This is my favorite. This is why most of us are here. I used this measurement for my Glyphius software and all of the copywriting statistical studies posted on my blog and in the Statistical Copywriting Online Home Study Course.

How can you get the profitability figures for other web-sites? Are they just going to turn them over? Actually, public companies do just that. You could use something like that public data. Also, many affiliate networks give indirect profitability figures (the marketplace at Clickbank, the EPC rating on CJ are both less accurate profitability numbers).

Or you could do what marketers have quietly done for decades before ecommerce and the Internet even existed. This is how Glyphius and the Statistical Copywriting course were created. It is really quite simple. Ask yourself these two questions:

1. If I was paying for advertising to a site that was profitable… would I continue to pay for that advertising month after month as long as it was profitable?

2. If I was paying for advertising to a site that wasn’t profitable… would I continue to pay for that advertising month after month?

The answer to #1 is clearly a “yes” for a vast majority of people. The answer to #2 is clearly a “no” for a vast majority of people. There are exceptions. Some large companies don’t even track the profitability of their ads… so they will add some incorrect data if we use this measurement.

The same thing happens in science all the time. Patients in medical studies lie or exagerate about their results (in both directions). People aren’t completely predictable. They do things against their own self-interest sometimes.

The solution? Same as with the other imperfect measurement techniques… increase the sample size and/or compare more distant extremes. If people were 100% predictable, then we wouldn’t need a very large sample size to look at these web-sites.

So, let’s take an example to see how this works. Let’s say some idiot “guru” marketer is telling you that using the digit “7

James D. Brausch is the creator of several software and information products about copywriting, traffic generation and product creation. His Statistical Copywriting Online Home Study Course ($65) can be found here: http://www.StatisticalCopywriting.com
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Split Testing Sucks And Other Heresies


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