In this post we will teach you how to split test your real estate investor website
Most real estate investors should not spend their time split testing their website. Very few have enough consistent traffic coming to their website to justify the expense and time allocation of a split test.
After talking with hundreds of investors it’s clear that a very small subset have the technical skillset or desire to effectively split traffic to their website to glean insights into user psychology and landing page effectiveness.
However, if the 1% of real estate investors find this page, I will show you a simple and free way to test traffic coming to your website.
How much traffic do you need to run a split test?
It depends on your goal. If you are looking for statistical relevance then you need a lot.
It’s actually a mistake to translate this question into the traffic needed. What you actually need is conversions. It doesn’t matter if you have 1,000,000 website visitors a month, if they aren’t converting the test will be pointless.
There are tools available to help you come up with a number if you really want to nerd out.
What should I do with limited traffic?
If you aren’t worried about statistical relevance and want a directional look at a landing page’s conversion rate compared to another – you can still set up the test and keep in mind that it’s a thumb in the wind type calculation.
How real estate investors can setup a split test on their websites
Time to get into the meat of this post.
We are going to use Google Optimize for this demo.
Why? Because it’s free, integrates with Google Analytics (which you likely have installed), and doesn’t have a lot of complicated features to distract or confuse you.
Step 1 – Create an account
Go to Google Optimize and click Create an Account. Simply give the account a name and click a few checkboxes
Step 2 – Add container
This is just a fancy way of saying create a sub-account to hold all your settings and configurations. I wouldn’t worry about this too much. Just name it the same as your website or company name
Step 3 – Chose Your Test Type
You will be presented with a couple of options. First, put the URL (your domain name) in the field below the name. You can click the “learn more” link to read about each. For this example, we will select “redirect test”.
Step 4 – Create your test
Don’t worry – this step is painless. You can use Google’s UI and fill out the information. If you goof up or want to restart, feel free.
Add Variant – this is the second URL you’d like the test. For this example, I’ll select a previous blog post.
Variants, page targeting, and audience targeting – to keep things simple I am going to leave these set to default. This basically says to split the traffic between the two websites 50/50 and don’t worry where the traffic comes from. In the future, you could split test this against paid ad traffic who has higher intent. But that is for another post.
Link your Google Analytics account – this will send all your data into a single spot for you to review.
Create an objective – what are we tracking as a conversion? For most real estate investors, it will be a lead filling out a form or making a phone call. This step assumes you have a Google Analytics goal setup. Most Carrot websites have this by default and you should see the option from the dropdown. For this website I have it selected as Google Ads Experiment Sign Up
Click start – scroll back to the top and click start
Step 5 – Wait and monitor
Split tests take time. If you are receiving 100-200 sessions per month, this test could run for 3-4 months if you want enough data to act on.
But while you are waiting – you might be curious where you can see your data. You can view the data in Google Optimize or within Google Analytics.
To find the same data in Google Analytics after you log in go to Behavior > Experiments
In Conclusion
I would not recommend running multiple split tests at once. Doing so muddies the water and makes it really complicated to track conversions and paths if a user visits multiple websites.
If you need ideas on what to split test I recommend searching Carrot’s blog.
Some of the best ways I have seen split tests work is with a very narrow funnel. What I mean by that is a specific landing page from a specific campaign with paid ad traffic. If you are marketing for “stop foreclosure” type messaging you could have a split test that talks about one benefit of using your company and another landing page talking about a different benefit. You can see which benefit resonates more with the traffic and produces a higher conversion rate.
Again this is very in the weeds and nerdy. I would not recommend a split test to the following real estate investors
- New to real estate marketing
- Limit time to devote to real estate marketing
- Have never ran a split test before
- Have limited traffic
- Haven’t closed a deal
I put all of these in a list because I truly believe your time is better spent making mistakes and improving your deal flow and closing deals than optimize the minor nuances of a landing page.