When you’re scheduling Facebook posts, taking photos for Instagram, writing scripts for upcoming YouTube videos and composing blog content for your real estate website, it’s easy to start guessing what kind of content your audience will most likely engage with.

But when you’re spending money on marketing, playing a guessing game can be pretty risky.

And this is where split testing or A/B testing comes in.

What It Is

A/B testing is a way for you to compare different versions of a landing page at the same time to determine which one performs better and captures more leads.

Really, you can think of it as a scientific experiment you can apply to your website in order to get results to better focus your marketing efforts and dollars.

Why You Should Do It

The ultimate goal of all of your marketing efforts is to land more clients, right?

And you do this by driving quality traffic back to your real estate website.

More Visitors=More Leads=More Sales

A/B testing is one of the most efficient forms of CRO.

Is CRO a new term to you?

Take a sec to familiarize yourself with it.

CRO stands for conversion rate optimization.

I’d image you’ve been focusing mainly on SEO (search engine optimization) and that’s totally fine.

These two aren’t in competition with one another, but both require your attention.

See, with SEO tactics you’re working on getting your website more traction and visibility in search results online.

But what happens once folks decide to visit your website?

This is where CRO comes into play.

There’s no point in getting to the first page of Google if no one is going to convert when they finally land on your site.

In order to increase your conversion rate and land more sales, you need to know what your audience is going to respond to.

By testing two landing pages against one another, you can achieve this and much more.

Soon you’ll have a lower bounce rate and can continue to get to know your audience.

This way, you can share valuable information across all platforms.

But it really does start with landing pages.

The entire point of a landing page is for you to provide something of value in exchange for contact information.

When you compare two landing pages that both have the same end goal, you allow your visitors to weigh in on what parts of your marketing plan are and aren’t working.

And none of this is to say that what you’re doing is wrong or ineffective.

That isn’t the case as all.

All this allows you to do is fine-tune your actions so you can convert more leads as efficiently as possible.

Online marketing has to be consistently modified and improved and split testing your activity will give you solid results to put into action.

What Should You Test?

So, what should you be testing and why?

When you are testing landing pages, there are a ton of components you can change.

But, you should only test one page element at a time.

Changing up the format and content of entire pages isn’t going to yield any kind of usable data.

It’s the subtle variables that can influence the most major results.

Take this Squeeze Page, for instance.

There are a lot of small components we can tweak to start gauging results.

Headline
Sub Heads
Call To Action
Colors
Images
Videos
Format/layout

Are all examples of things you can change and cross test.

But start with just one and then track your results.

For a full breakdown of exactly how to put this a/b testing into action for landing pages, make sure to check out this video!

So, you definitely don’t have to limit your testing criteria to just text or images.

You do, however, have to decide on a single element to start with.

After you decide what to compare, get to it and track your progress and results via Google Analytics.

Final Thoughts

At this point in your career, you’ve probably gotten pretty good at trusting your intuition and relying on it to direct some of your marketing efforts.

When it comes to knowing your audience, you should still trust your gut, but you can also refine your strategies with the data-driven results you obtain through split testing.

That’s why your real estate landing pages are a great place to start with this.

You can still decide what you want to give away in exchange for contact information.

You can offer