Aside from getting feedback from other writers to help you improve your copy, another way to do it is to put your work live and find out how it converts. The main thing to realize is that you can follow all the “rules” of copywriting, but you won’t know what really works to convert your audience unless you test your ideas.
One way to test your ideas is through split testing. This is also called A/B testing. All it means is that you test two almost identical pages of copy against each other at the same time. Depending on the software you use, you may need to figure out how to do it right, but you can do this via Google Ads, and you can even do it manually. Let’s explore how.
Create Your Copy
The first thing you need to do when you want to conduct any sort of A/B testing is to first create the best copy you can without even thinking about the testing you will do. Whether it’s a sales page, or a blog post, or something else, just create it the best you can with all your goals in mind.
Change One Thing
Now that you have your totally finished sales page, you want to create a duplicate of it, and then you want to change one thing to see if that works better than your original. For example, you may want to change the color, the headline, or your call to action. Only change one thing, so you know what caused the differences.
Publish
It depends on the type of systems you use how this part happens. If you use landing page software, you may be able to load both pages into your system at the same time, and the system will automatically send half your audience to page A and half to page B. If you use Google to deliver your ads, you can allow Google to do it. You can also use Facebook Ads to test. The way you do it will totally depend on the instructions from the platform you choose to use.
Analyze
Once you run the test, you’ll want to give it enough time to get traffic (and you should be working to send traffic), but you don’t want to run the test for too long, or the results won’t be relevant. Usually, about two weeks is enough to generate enough hits to give you enough information to analyze.
Tweak
When you get the results from your analytics, the page that wins the contest between A and B is the winner. Now you can take that page and try testing something else that you did not test before. Keep doing this until you have the type of results from the advertisement that you think you should get.
Repeat
If you make it a habit always to conduct split testing, not only will you find that you end up with more traffic and sales, you’ll start getting better at creating the first test draft. You’ll notice that over time you know what your audience likes, and you will be able to start each test at a higher level than the previous.
Every business and audience are different. While general copywriting advice holds true, and you should learn about it as much as you can, you won’t know what converts best for you until you start to test it. Consider making testing part of your process so that you are always improving.
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