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Of course they did! Would you want to put people into a helicopter with a new technology like “anti-crash” and risk their lives? No. You’d test it using an empty helicopter first and pray that it works. Your marketing doesn’t have to be that radical. You aren’t going to lose millions if one of your tests fails, but you will lose millions, if you don’t test everything.

I run hundreds of tests on everything, so that’s number one. I don’t decide. The people who come to my website decide. My experience has been most of the time that sites without graphics tend to convert better. However, with that said, sometimes that’s not the case.

What’s on the site is just as much, if not more, a factor od whether or not there’s a graphic or whatever. The quality or the effectiveness or how compelling the copy is certainly is a more predominant factor than whether or not there are graphics on the site. The fact is we’re currently completely testing all of our sites to do even better, so it’s a constant change. What it comes down to is you need to start with something, and then improve it over time.

I’ve heard people say that they don’t have any or minimal text on their squeeze pages, but that they have a good video and the video out-pulls anything else. Every video I’ve ever tried has under-pulled completely bare-bones, strictly-text, no-graphics, no-sound pages in many, many cases. There are so many different factors that to make a blanket statement is really a fallacy.

The demographic of your target, the topic of your site, and the emotional level of your site come into play. Even where they’re coming from. What that can mean is one week, if you do a paid ezine ad in XYZ ezine, you get a 30% conversion, and that’s the best you’ve ever done. Then you turn around and promote in another ezine and you get a 50% conversion, and you’re excited.

Then you turn around and you try a different promotion in that same ezine that did well for you and, all of a sudden, it drops down to 15%. You’re looking at the overall average over time. It’s basically looking at your stats and constantly improving them is really what it comes down to. Test one thing at a time, if you’re doing simple A/B split testing, though, so you know what works and what doesn’t. Change your headline, change your bullet points, or change your background color. But don’t try to change them all at once.

You can go to a Taguchi-style testing, if you use Google’s Website Optimizer, but you have to have a handle on the technical aspects of your site or it will be impossible for you to use it successfully. With Optimizer, you can test several elements of your page at the same time, and Google’s software will tell you which element provided the best results.

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