How to use WordPress Divi Page Builder – Part 3 – Split testing. 

Building your beautiful website with the WordPress Divi Builder is an exciting process, but how can you be sure that you’re making the most effective choices in your build? Have you put your email sign up form in the right place? Is that call to action as effective as it could be?

Divi really does have everything, because the answer to all of these questions; a process known as split testing – is build right in, in the form of easy-to-use Divi Leads. The joy of split testing is that you can identify any element of your website and create multiple versions. Using Divi Leads, you can smoothly roll out multiple versions to your website visitors, and see which ones perform the best.

Why split resting is so useful.

You know that the performance of your website is key, and you want the potential that each visit becomes a conversion to be pushed to it’s maximum! Divi Leads can help you take the guess work out of this process by helping you invisibly experiment with different strategies of attack. If we take the example of a call to action button: you might have two different ideas of the text that appears within the button, the size of the font, or the colour of the button. If you roll out two different versions of that call to action button, and 50% of your audience gets to see each, you can track which one gets the most clicks, and results in the most conversions. With split testing, you can hone and polish your website until each element is performing at its greatest potential. This means driving the success of your business, with small tweaks that you know make all the difference.

How to split test with Divi leads.

To get the ball rolling with your first split test, open the Divi Builder Page Settings and activate the Split Testing feature. Click save, and wait for the prompt to choose your subject, and your goal. For the subject, you can choose any Module, Row, Or Section. You will see, on the Divi Wireframe view, that the element you have chosen is duplicated – with a number displayed on the right side of the top bar of that element, so you can easily navigate between them and set up your test. By default, there will be one duplicate and therefore two different versions, each to be seen by 50% of your site visitors, but you can also create more duplicates. You might want to create five different versions of your Email Optin Module, each shown to 20% of your audience, and see which one gets the most signups! Divi Leads will prompt you to pick your subject via a yellow highlight for your mouse pointer within the Wireframe view.

Next, select the goal, which will dictate what Divi tracks on your behalf. This can, again, be any element on the page. In the case of the Email Optin Module, it’s easy to imagine that the subject and goal are going to be the very same module. If, however, you want to see how your landing page’s introductory paragraph impacts sales in your eCommerce shop, the subject will be the module that contains that paragraph, but the goal will be the eCommerce Module, allowing Divi Leads to track sales from that page. If you want to play with layout, you might choose a whole selection as your subject, and a goal to go along with it. At any given time, you can set up one split test on any given page, but have different tests running simultaneously on as many pages of your website as you like.  Divi Leads will prompt you to pick your subject with a turquoise highlight for your mouse pointer within the Wireframe view.

Other bits and bobs you can tweak.

As you gear up to roll out your split test, there are a few other nifty tools that Divi Leads has set up for you. The first is a cap on your bounce rates. The bounce rate is how often people land on a page of your website, before immediately closing it, or heading back to their search results via the back button – yikes! Obviously, bounces are something that you want to keep as low as possible, so Divi Leads allows you to limit what bounce rate you will allow within your split test. This means that if one of your test options is a major turn-off for your visitors, the split test will halt, and nobody else will be presented with the faux-pas test subject in question. If you’re limited for server space, you can tweak how often Divi Leads caches your stats in the WP database, resetting its own counters to zero. If you want to get seriously technical, and track off-page goals too, Divi Leads provides the chance to input short code tracking commands as well.

Now, just wait for the stats to roll in.

You can view your current split test results by clicking on the stats icon, that looks like a little bar graph, at the top of the Divi Builder. The stats display will lead with whatever is most relevant to your goal, although you can explore other metrics too. What’s important to realise at this stage is that you really need a substantial enough volume of statistics for the results to be useful. If you’ve only had a few views on each version of a page, and one has nabbed one click through, while the other has two, it’s not a reliable enough pattern to tell you much. Wait until you’ve seen a decent amount of traffic, that will give you a true insight into which version of your test subject is going to improve your bottom line.

When it’s time to analyse your results, the Divi Leads stats display will make everything beautifully simple to interpret. You can check out your goals; be they clicks, conversions, sales, reads, or bounce rates and view your overall goal engagement for each version that you’ve launched. Going back to my original call to action button, in a two-version test, if I can see that the first version has gained a 43% click rate, while the second has a 62% click rate, then version number two is certainly the one I’ll be going forwards with! Of course, after this split test is done, I can always start another test, and play with a totally new version of what I’m hoping to perfect.