If you’re building sales funnels and landing pages in WordPress, for yourself or your clients, Elementor is a bit of a dream come true.

Super easy to create conversion-focused landing pages, drag-n-drop, directly there in WordPress.

Course if you’re serious about the performance of your landing pages and want to squeeze the most conversions possible – which you do – then you need to be split testing those landing pages….

There’s a new free split testing plugin for Elementor – literally just been released. You can run and manage split tests directly in Elementor, right there in your WordPress admin panel.

It’s called Split Test for Elementor, by Rocket Elements. And in this video, I’ll be taking it for a run out and seeing how it can help you split test landing pages directly in WordPress, without the need for a separate service.

Watch the video:

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Transcript

Hi I’m Dave Foy from Design Build Web.

If you’re building sales funnels and landing pages in WordPress, for yourself or your clients, Elementor is a bit of a dream come true.

Super easy to create conversion-focused landing pages, drag-n-drop, directly there in WordPress.

Course if you’re serious about the performance of your landing pages and want to squeeze the most conversions possible – which you do – then you need to be split testing those landing pages.

If you don’t know what split testing is, sometimes called A/B testing… I’ll explain it in a second.

Usually, I’d use a 3rd party tool like Optimizely for split testing. But there’s a new free split testing plugin for Elementor – literally just been released. You can run and manage split tests directly in Elementor, right there in your WordPress admin panel.

It’s called Split Test for Elementor, by Rocket Elements. And in this video, I’ll be taking it for a run out and seeing how it can help you split test landing pages directly in WordPress, without the need for a separate service.

Let’s dive in.

What’s split testing?

This particular video won’t be an in-depth ‘how to’ about split testing as such, I’ll focus on reviewing the plugin.

I do have a training program that teaches you how to plan, build and manage sales funnels with WordPress and Elementor. It’s called No Fear Funnels, I only open it a few times a year. If you’re interested… you can sign up to be notified here, I’ll pop a link below the video: https://www.nofearfunnels.co

So very briefly, what’s split testing? It’s a method of improving the conversion performance of pages on your website.

So, say I have a landing page – here’s one I made earlier. This is a landing page we’ve made in No Fear Funnels actually.

This page has ONE job – to get someone to give us their email address in return for this free guide. Everything on this page is focused on that conversion goal – opting in to our list.

If we can improve the conversion rate – meaning, the percentage of sign-ups from everyone who sees this page – even just incrementally a bit here and a bit there over time, we drive more sign-ups, more sales, more revenue from the SAME AMOUNT of traffic. It’s much harder to get more traffic than it is to convert what you have.

It’s worth me saying here quickly – you only really want to be looking at conversion optimisation like this, split testing, when you’ve got some decent traffic AND decent numbers of conversions already. Otherwise you just don’t have enough data to make reliable decisions.

So, typical things to look to tweak to improve conversions would be things like the headline, the copy, the image, the button (the text on the button, the color of the button, the size of the button, its position on the page). All kinds of things.

People have strong opinions on how to run split tests, or A/B tests: how many elements you should test at a time, the number of variations per test, etc.

Here’s the over-simplified version – just for clarity if you’re new to split testing:

The basic idea is you change one element at a time to see if it improves conversions.

So I might decide to change color of this button, for example, to green. See if more people opt-in with a green call to action button than a red one.

So we’d create 2 variations of the button color – red and green.

Our split testing tool – like the plugin I’m about to show you – will show Version A of the page with the red button – to 50% of visitors, and version B – with a green button – to the other 50%.

And then after enough traffic has seen the page, see which version had the higher conversion rate.

And the version with the highest conversion rate is the winner. That version becomes the live version for all visitors from now on.

Review the tool

Let’s have a look at the new Split Test for Elementor plugin. Just bear in mind that this plugin has JUST been released at the time of making this video, it’s really early days.

There’s a free version here on the WordPress repo and a paid pro version too this is on the developer’s site, Rocket Elements. I’ll pop links to both below this video and I’ll go into the difference between the 2 versions in a moment.

What I already love about this is it’s a separate add-on to Elementor. I’d hate the Elementor team to add functionality like this to Elementor itself.

I mean, Divi’s got a built-in split testing tool and Divi’s a bloated mess. Elementor is not. I say, let’s keep it that way.

Ok… let’s set up a split test.

I’m editing this landing page with Elementor.

I want to test changing this button color, so to set up that test. You can set up a test either here in the landing page OR in the plugin’s settings in the admin panel. I’ll show you how to do it from here first, doesn’t really matter.

So you click into the settings for the section that the button is in.

In Advanced, come down to the Split Test panel.

Add a new test.

Give this test a name we’ll understand later – I’ll go with ‘Button colour’. British spelling there for you. That describes what we’re testing.

Save the test.

Now to add variations. Remember we’re going with 2 here.

So I’ll add the first variation:

Let’s call it ‘Red button’. Obviously.

And show that to 50% of visitors. If we had 4 variations, 4 different colours, we’d show each to 25% of visitors.

Save that variation – that’s #1. So this section has been saved as Button Colour Variation #1, containing the red button.

You have to – right now anyway – save entire sections as variations, you can’t make variations of individual widgets. More on that later.

Now another variation, for the green button. So I’ll have to create a separate section:

So I’ll duplicate this one.

Right click the section > duplicate.

Scroll down to this section here.

Change the button on this section to green.

Now to assign this green button section as variation #2 for the button color test.

Section settings > Advanced > Split Test.

So yes, we’re still assigning this to the Button Colour split test. Note you could have several different tests available in this dropdown. We only have one right now.

Split test variation – this is ‘Green Button’ – again, just for our future reference when looking at the stats later.

Now I’ll save this landing page.

I’ll just visit the page now. let’s see which variation the plugin decides to show me.

So I’m seeing the red button version here, at random. That was Variation 1. And the plugin sets a cookie in the browser so I’ll always see the red button each time I visit this page.

Let’s go back into the WordPress admin and see the stats so far.

We have a new Split Test menu here.

There’s the button colour test here and if I edit….

There are the 2 named variations.

By the way, as I mentioned earlier, you can create your test and various variations HERE first if you want, then they’ll already be available in the dropdown list in the Elementor editor. Doesn’t matter which way round you do it.

And back up. And here are the stats.

So there’s my visit recorded. That’s great.

But no conversions. And of course, that’s cos I’ve not told the plugin what constitutes a conversion. All I’ve done is visited the landing page so far and seen one of the variations.

So I need to add conversion tracking to the thanks page that people see after submitting the form on the landing page. When someone lands on the thanks page, it’ll register a conversion in the stats.

Before I do that, confusing it’s got a green colour for the red button test and a red color for the green button test. They’re just random colours set by the plugin so you can see each variation clearly in the stats, just happen to be the 2 button colors we’re testing.

Anyway, go into Pages and edit the thanks page for this landing page’s form.

Here it is, I’ll edit with Elementor.

There’s a new Split Test Conversion widget down here in the widget list.

I’ll just pop it below this text. You could add a whole new section at the bottom of the page and put it there if you wanted to keep it separate, you’d just set the section’s columns gap to No Gap so it didn’t add any extra whitespace to your page.

In the conversion widget settings, select the test that this widget is tracking, so it matches up.

Now save the thanks page.

Right – let’s give it a test! I’ll follow the same path as a regular visitor would.

So back to my landing page in a browser.

Yep, send me my free guide.

Pop in my name and email and submit.

And boom – there’s the thanks page.

So let’s see if that’s tracked a conversion against someone viewing the red button, the one I saw.

So back to the WordPress admin, under the Split Test menu.

Here’s the test I set up and click into Statistics.

And there it is. One conversion for the variation we saw, with a graph and a chart and a table. You can later also filter by date. Excellent.

So once you’ve run this test out long enough for plenty of traffic to see the page, then you can see which version won. At the absolute bare minimum you want 100 pairs of eyes on this page, ideally 1000 or more for more accurate results. If you haven’t got enough of traffic, focus on getting more of traffic FIRST, not on split testing.

So once you have a winner, you keep the winning version, ditch the losing version.

And then run MORE tests! And keep gradually increasing the conversion rate over time.

As I say, this is really early days for this plugin, it’s literally just been released. But as a simple alternative to 3rd party tools like Google Optimize and Optimizely, built right into WordPress, and integrated directly with Elementor, it’s looking very promising.

Pro version

There are a few things I think need improving, but first just to mention that in the free version you can run 2 variations per test, but there’s a paid Pro version that unlocks unlimited variations.

That’s the only difference between free and paid right now, but the developers tell me they’ll be adding more testing targets soon (more on that in a minute), and other features based on user feedback.

One thing to note, when you test multiple variations, you introduce a statistical risk of false positives that accumulates with every additional variation you test for. I don’t pretend to understand the theory behind it, but I know other tools like Optimizely and Google Optimize run some complex maths to correct for this error. Not sure if this plugin does that yet, but something to bear in mind.

Suggestions

I can’t stress enough, this is early days for this plugin. But after my trial run I’ve got a few suggestions, as well as a few from friends who’ve tried it too.

Heck, some of these might already have been implemented by the time you see this video, I don’t know.

1. In the editor, I’m only running 2 variations here and already the page is a bit messy to edit. Would be nice to be able to show and hide the variations to make page editing easier.
2. It’d be good to have it obvious which sections are being split tested. I only know right now by clicking into the section settings, which could get confusing. Some kind of visual indicator around the section would be good.
3. I’d like eventually to be able to split test individual widgets – so, just the button widget in my example, not the entire section. And I’d like eventually to be able to test entire pages too.
4. The method of setting tracking of the conversion page – the thanks page – is a bit clunky. You have to drag a widget onto the thanks page. It’d be nicer to be able to set your conversion page from a dropdown menu in the test editor in WordPress.
5. And the ability to test more conversion targets would be fantastic. Currently it’s just a page destination. Testing form submissions would be nice, button clicks too. Even someone scrolling down to a certain point on the same page – for example, to see which headline at the top encourages people to read further down the page.

Well done Rocket Elements for this idea, very promising indeed. I’ll be using it myself and keeping a close eye.

As I mentioned earlier, if you’re interested in planning and building high-converting sales funnels with WordPress and Elementor I have a course called No Fear Funnels, it opens a few times a year for enrolment, you can sign up to be notified. I’ll drop the link below. It’s especially for people who identify as non-marketers. If you’re put off by the usual sleazy marketing sales tactics, this course i for you.

If you like this video and found it useful, do me a favour – click the thumbs up and drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

Happy split testing. See you soon!

The post How to A/B Split Test Landing Pages with Elementor appeared first on Design Build Web.