This is a transcript of episode 73 of the Let’s Get Data-Driven Podcast

I’m Lanie Lamarre and on today’s episode, I’m talking about how I split-test a sales page and what my results were so that you can hopefully use and apply this with your own optimization strategies.

Back in February, I once again participated in Kate Doster’s Back To Business Bundle and if you want to hear about my first experience with that, check out episode 24 to see how that first one went and why I recommend the strategy for list-building.

Another thing that bundles are great for is when you’re trying to test or validate an offer. Oftentimes when you launch a new offer or service, you’ll do what people call a “soft launch” to just get your offer out there and see if it has legs. I did that at the end of 2021 with The YOUR CEO DAY Workbook. I was tired of hearing bosses say “what do I do on a CEO Day?” and seeing creative solopreneurs struggle with quarterly planning, so I created this workbook where they could take an afternoon off and use that workbook every quarter to move the needle forward in their businesses, their way. I posted a simple “make due” sales page – nothing fancy or thorough – but now that I knew this offer had some legs, I wanted to formalize it a little more and this is where my participation in the bundle came in.

Before you agree to any type of collaboration, it’s a good idea to establish what your expectations are ahead of time. Of course, “lead-generation” and “list-building” come to mind when you’re participating in a bundle but try to think “yeah, and THEN what am I doing with these new leads, and what kind of experience does that offer these new people?” It’s especially important to consider when you’re partaking in a group collaboration like a bundle because you have to realize that it will be difficult for you to stand out once you hit that inbox, and you want to consider that you aren’t the only person with an evergreen sequence or a pitch to send these new subscribers through. You really want to think through and be strategic about your participation with a group collaboration.

The Back To Business Bundle ran from Monday March 7th to Friday March 11th and I contributed The YOUR CEO DAY Workbook with 2 purposes in mind: 1) to collect more testimonials I could use on my new sales page; and 2) to test my new sales page.

I had 2 versions of the sales page and on Wednesday, I swapped the 1st version out for the 2nd version to see if there would be a difference in engagement or conversions. The 1st version had that initial “above the fold” hero section you immediately see was darker and the buttons were a bright lime green whereas the 2nd version was much brighter and the buttons were a razzle-dazzle shade of Barbie convertible pink.

I use Kartra as my main software hub and this made it so easy to split-test my page performance because Kartra makes it simple to see how each page performed through their Engagement Page Analytics reporting and their Conversion Page Analytics reporting. If you want to test that out for yourself, I’ll include a link to get a free trial to Kartra in the shownotes but you don’t need fancy software to get some baseline numbers here: you can just look at your page visits and the actual number of opt-ins based on the dates you’re split-testing.

Never let fancy software be the reason you say you don’t know your numbers. Baseline numbers make up 80% of any result you’re looking for.

Overall, I had 1344 page visits over that 5-day period. According to my Engagement Analytics, my page kept a 76% engagement rate for people who were engaged for 10 seconds or longer, and the average page scroll was about 45% of the page. That means that more than half the people who came to my sales page and saw my offer and the product breakdown did not see my “who I am” bio section or the FAQs.

I realize that this is a free bundle and people are not going to interact with this sales page in the same way as they would if it were a paid product. But I was really testing to see whether one look or use of color would significantly out-perform the interest and engagement I would see from people, and spoiler alert: the answer is no, there wasn’t a significant difference at all.

The 1st page that rolled out Monday to Wednesday had a 77% engagement rate with an average page scroll of 45% while Wednesday to Friday had an engagement rate of 75% with an average page scroll of 45% as well. Page scroll was identical and the difference in engagement rate was marginal.

As for my Conversion Analytics, the overall percentage of people who came to my page and signed up was 62.6% and this seemed weirdly low to me for something that was a free offer that the visitors actively chose to click-through on, so I definitely wanted to see what exactly had happened here.

It turns out, my conversions for people who were using a desktop were great: they made up 86% of the people who signed up even though less than 75% of my visitors were using a desktop. This actually isn’t great news because out of all my mobile and tablet visitors, less than 1/3 of them signed up; this meant I needed to take a look at what the mobile and tablet experience was for that page to see what we can change to make that a better experience for those visitors.

As for the different pages, the Conversion Analytics reflected the same story told by the Engagement Analytics: the difference was marginal with Monday to Wednesday converting at 63% while Wednesday to Friday converted at 62% so there was no obvious winner or front-runner in terms of image and color use, and my biggest take-away here was the difference in conversions based on device usage.

At first, the time people spent on my page also took me by surprise. Monday started with a time I probably would have predicted coming in at just under 6 minutes, but then Tuesday was 24 minutes, Wednesday dropped back down to 7 minutes, Thursday was 34 minutes and Friday was 6 minutes. Weird, right? There did seem to be a correlated trend between the percentage of people who signed up with the time spent; the days where people spent less than 10 minutes on my page would have a lower conversion rate by about 8%.

To help you visualize this, the time spent on my page throughout the week looked like the McDonald’s arches whereas the actual number of people who visit my page was shaped more like a skateboard halfpipe where Monday and Friday significantly outperformed the more “saggy” middle days.

It dawned on me that I should compare the time spent on my other pages because it seemed a little “extra” but it turn out, nah! that’s my jam. People who buy my offers spend 25 minutes on my sales page on average and the button they use most often to purchase is the one nearest to product breakdown.

Which means the “to update” list had a new entry and I would have to review my sales pages to see if we can test some opportunities for increased conversions outside of laptop and maybe better calls-to-action in those conversion heavy areas.

Again, all of this is easy to do in Kartra: there’s no additional tracking to put in place or goals to create, this all gets tracked automatically and I like that it gives you just enough information to make these types of data-driven decisions but not so much that you’re too overloaded with information to actually synthesize what it all means.

I’ll be interested in seeing what we can do about improving the tablet and mobile sign-ups, though. This isn’t a problem I see on my other sales pages – which, thank all the little pastries in the bakery for that, huh? – but it’s definitely something I want to better understand about how I’m performing.

And look, that’s the advantage of doing these types of “lessons learned” reviews: these are personalized understandings about how you are interacting, engaging and converting with the people who are paying attention to what you have to say. The insights you gain in one area get to be carried through to your next campaign and provide you with a much shorter learning curve to achieve results you’re satisfied with and by.

Which is all an “optimizing strategy” is: try something, position yourself to measure your outcome, and see what the story is and how you can tell a better one.

If you want to learn more about optimizing, it’s the topic we’re focusing on in the Membership To Get-Data-Driven this month and I encourage you to check that out by clicking on the link in the shownotes or go to trackitlikeitowesyou.com.

Also I’ve had some questions about Black Friday/Cyber Monday and I’ll say that no, there will be no sale price on the membership and that’s A-OK because the membership is already a super-low priced product that delivers mega-high value so you’re getting a deal, whenever you choose to join.

But as I mentioned, I’ll be doing something special for The YOUR CEO DAY workbook so if you aren’t already on my mailing list, there’s a link in the shownotes for you to do that now and eliminate from your 2023 vocabulary the question about “what do I do on a CEO Day?”.

We will talk soon, baiiieeeeee!!!