Firepole Marketing Blog: What Ants Can Teach Us About Sales Pages

What Ants Can Teach Us About Sales Pages

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 05:15 AM PST

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What do you do when you have a very large area to search, and limited time?

When the area is far larger than can be systematically covered using available resources?

You wander around randomly.

Not because you're lost, but because in this situation wandering around at random is about as efficient as any other method of search.

You wander around like ants at a picnic.

Ants essentially wander about at random in search of food. When they find it, they leave a trail of pheromones on their way back to the nest. Other ants can follow the trail back to the food. Each ant adds more pheromones to the trail. As a result of this collective, cooperative behavior, the most efficient path to the largest food source emerges over time.

Good for the ants. So what does this have to do with sales pages?

Split-Path Testing

We all know about split-testing, right? Change one little thing on a sales page and measure the result; repeat ad infinitum. But what about split-path testing?

Suppose your sales page has 6 major elements on it. You know the sort of thing:

Fascinating pictures
Impressive testimonials,
Engaging stories
Illustrative slice-of-life dialogs
Riveting demonstrations
Emotion-laden benefits descriptions

There are many other possibilities, but suppose we have just these six elements. What order is “best” for presenting these elements?

Let’s see, we’d have 6 choices for the first element, then 5 choices for the second, and so on, for a total of 720 possibilities.

Traditional split-testing would have us make 720 variants of the same page, each with the elements in a different order. Not. Gonna. Happen.

But what if we could test all possible paths at once, by treating our visitors like ants?

(Note: please do not literally treat your visitors like ants. Visitors are people.)

I Hack, Therefore I Am

I created a small hack to WordPress (and Premise) that enables very simple split-path testing.

I don’t know if it works “better” than more traditional approaches – the jury’s still out on that one – but it is much easier than creating 720 variants of the same sales page!

Three Ways to Do Split-Path Testing

The hack supports three ways to do split-path testing:

a random sales letter
a random-walk presentation
“maze” pages

Caveat: this is a work in progress, not a proper plugin. Yet.

Random Sales Letter

A “random sales letter” is a long-copy sales landing page that assembles the content from predefined chunks, but in a random order. So if you ever wondered whether it would be better to put testimonial 1 and then some benefits bullets and then testimonial 2, or put the bullets first and then the testimonials, or put both testimonials first and then the bullets, and so on, you can use this to test nearly every possible combination of your sales page elements.

Every time someone visits a random sales letter page, the content is regenerated in a new random order. So each visitor, in general, will see a different ordering of the elements.

The last element, however, is not random: it is the goal element, e.g. the Buy Now button or Subscribe form. This always appears at the end of the landing page.

Random-Walk Presentation

A “random-walk presentation” is a kind of “sideways sales letter”. Basically, it's just a landing page that presents each elements of a sales page in sequence. The visitor clicks a "Next Page" button to see the next element – but the ordering of the elements in the sequence is chosen randomly for each visitor.

When all of the elements have been presented, the goal page is shown last.

Maze Pages

A “maze page” is a mini-site page, where the menu items show different sections of your copy or different kinds of pages, and the exit/buy link only appears after the visitor has clicked on a certain number of the menu items. This allows visitors to navigate through the elements of the sales page in the order they prefer, instead of a randomly chosen order.

What’s the Catch?

Over time, given enough visitors, most or all possible orderings will be presented.

And that’s the catch. For this to work – like any split-testing scenario – you have to have enough traffic to generate statistically significant results. The more possible paths there are, the more traffic you might need to be certain of convergence.

But the glimmer of hope is that one path will quickly be seen to outperform all the others, and that may give you insight into the kind and order of information that your visitors like to see.

The additional advantage of maze pages over the other two options is that by allowing the visitor to select the elements in the order they desire, the bias of your visitors should soon become apparent.

I suspect that maze pages are a more efficient split-path testing mechanism than the other two, but don’t have hard numbers to back it up. Yet. Even if I did, they may or may not apply to your audience.

Summary

Split-testing can be a lot of work. Split-path testing doesn't have to be, but it may take a lot of traffic to get useful results.

Even if you're happy with it, take a hard look at your best-performing landing page. If you allowed the visitor to choose which sections to read and in what order, what do you think they would choose and why?

If you rearranged the order of the elements, would it still make sense? Would it make more sense?

Steven A. Lowe knows 101 Ways to Land More Business Using Landing Pages. When he's not studying marketing and copywriting, he runs Innovator LLC, which specializes in consulting and custom software development.