5 Reasons Your Last Marketing Test Failed

Welcome to another edition of the “5 Reasons” blog series. This will be a weekly blog series, with a fresh post every Monday. Last week’s topic was “Five Reasons You Need to Generate News”.

This Week’s Topic = Five Reasons Your Last Marketing Test Failed

As a marketer, part of your job is to continue to improve on what you’re already doing. Get a higher response rate, great return on investment, more bang for your buck. And that means testing. But what happens when your tests fail? What happens when you feel like you are taking two steps backward in order to take one step forward?

Here are 5 reasons your last marketing test failed:

1. You didn’t test the right thing. You may have thought the headline has the biggest impact when actually no one reads it. You may have thought the colors you used would affect the response when it’s all about the content. A failed test can still teach you something, usually that something is, you’re paying attention to the wrong thing.
2. You didn’t measure it correctly. You’re measuring the number of calls an ad drives when really what it does is push traffic to your website. Or maybe you’re measuring lower numbers of purchases but the value of each purchase is going up. Make sure you try to see the whole picture before you make any determinations.
3. You didn’t track it correctly. You tested the right thing, but you have no way of knowing whether you found a winner or not. Believe it or not, this is usually the biggest problem. Make sure you can track the numbers for each version of your test in order to make the necessary decisions.
4. You didn’t take into account outside factors. If you ran a test during the runup to election day, or during Hurricane Sandy, or the fiscal cliff negotiations, then the data you are seeing is bound to be a little skewed. Make sure to factor into your testing and analysis any outside events that may be changing or affecting the numbers.
5. You have the best possible version of whatever you’re trying to test. Too bad this is never the case. It can always be better. Don’t ever let yourself be convinced that something can’t be improved.

As always, if you have your own landing page tips, please include them in the comments below.