April 2010

Can you guess which PPC landing page got 93% more clicks on its ‘add to cart’ button? This test is a great example of a consumer packaged good brand using a/b tests to learn which benefits and tone work best for them. (So much quicker and cheaper than traditional focus groups!)

Important note: The traffic to the pages came from matching PPC ads, so the headline on Version A came from a PPC ad with similar copy. However, all the traffic came from the same search terms. If you’re going to do PPC ad landing page copy tests, you really should do them this way… otherwise a mismatch between ad and landing page headline can throw your results badly off.

Done any PPC ad and matching landing page tests yourself? Let us know. In the meantime, cast your vote for this week’s test here.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who linked to us and helped get the word out about WhichTestWon this past week, especially Capterra, Mary Sweeny, Kathy Greenler Sexton, Rob MacDonald, Charity Email, Amanda MacArthur, Ann Curry, @MattP03, Reuben D. Rock, Linda Bustos, Mikko Kiviniemi, Lasse Larvanko, Listrak, Sabir Semerkant, Trask Rogers, Markus Peter, Sophie Shiatis, Sue Fidler, Robin Schwartz, Anthony Onesto, David Keating, Justin Cline, Hugo Guzman, Eric Graham, Joanna Pineda, Landing Page Tips, CopyClips blog, Opportunity Cost blog, and Jesse Light’s Email Marketing Optimization blog.

Can you guess which email subject line led to the highest overall click rate? The only difference was in punctuation – one subject line had a colon and the other a dash.

Can such a tiny change really make a difference in the amount of clicks the email message itself gets? Oh yeah. We’ve got the data for you, including a surprise about open rates…

Looking forward to your comments, and any testing war stories you’d like to share with the rest of us

P.S. Thanks to everyone who linked to us and helped get the word out about WhichTestWon this past week, especially Nathaniel Stott, Caroline Bosher, Suzanne Gerety, Leighanne Stainer, Hayley Chalmers, The Winery Web Site Report blog, Angie Nikoleychuk, João de Freitas, Jann Davis, Robson Zumkeller, CopyClips blog, Jason Hibbets, Janine Jones, Crystal Hayama Chen, Greg Brennan, Lucy Beer, CodeLife, Bex, Steve Gerencser, Landing Page Tips, and UXfeeds.

Can you guess which newsletter template got nearly 12% more clickthroughs? The changes are subtle, but they definitely made an impact.

Let’s face it, 95% of marketers probably don’t bother to test their email templates ever … even though email contributes significantly to the bottom line (especially considering its low cost.) This makes me nuts!

Testing your email template is fairly quick, easy, and cheap. I hope this week’s test inspires a few marketers to consider doing it. OK, my little rant is over Click over to see this week’s test here.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who linked to us and helped get the word out about WhichTestWon this past week, especially JulienBagein.com, IM Warfare’s forum participants, Patrick Neeman’s Usability Counts, Susan Shaffer, Greg Power, Karen Rustad, Robert Spangler, Pablo Donoghue, James Bethesda, T3, Pritesh Patel, IxD Studio, Els Aerts, Landing Page Tips, UX, UX Booth blog, Web Resources blog, Jeff Sexton Writes blog.