The Gigging Musician Podcast

Split Tests

Jared Judge

In this episode, Jared discusses the power of split testing, or testing different versions of a given element to see which one performs better. Split testing can be used to test different headlines, website layouts, ads, and more. The key is to send enough traffic to each version of the test in order to get statistically valid results. This can help you be more successful in doubling your number of bookings.

Hey, what's up gigging pros, it's Jared. And today I wanted to chat about the actually one of the most amazing tools that we as musicians have to be able to market our groups better, which is the concept of a split test. Before I dive in, I kind of want to share with you well, the strategy of that, and how I learned that. And just so you could see how you could possibly apply this to you. So the concept of a split test, you know, when you're doing your music marketing thing, you're putting something out there in the world. And in The Gigging Musician Podcast world, and Fulltime Music Academy, what we do is we're trying to book high paying gigs, mainly private event gigs. So in order to do that, we have to, as I mentioned, in a previous podcast, we have to set up a funnel, where we drive traffic using ADS, or connections that we build with venue owners and event planners. And then we send the people who can book us to our funnel, which typically is via our website, but we do our websites a little bit differently than others. And then if people like what they see and hear, then they'll give us their contact information, enabling us to sell to them via a presentation. And then if they like what they see in the presentation, then they they give us their credit card, and then they book, that's the concept of the funnel. If this is all brand new and kind of blowing your mind, definitely listened to a couple episodes back where I, the title of the episode is marketing gigs is like an audition process. And that'll give you a little bit more context into what I just mentioned. So the concept of a split test is when you put something out there, for the first time, you make an assumption that what you put out into the marketplace, is going to work. So you're saying that this is a good version of my ad, or this is a good version of my website, I think the text of this website is going to sell people on giving me their contact information. And then you set it live. And then you let the marketplace tell you if you were correct, you don't know if it's correct, you have these assumptions, like I think this is going to work. But you actually don't know until you put some some traffic behind it and get people visiting, and give people the option to take the action that you want them to take. So you can see why that's inherently risky. Because assumptions are very dangerous to make. But you have to make them when you're starting out. Now, what if you're wrong? What if the website that you put together actually doesn't convince people to give you their contact information. And ultimately, that will lead to failure, you know, you won't book anything, people will be turned off by what they see. And then they'll go and pick either a different musician, or they will pick no musician at all, which is actually the most common scenario, because people will pick whatever is easiest. So failure is is kind of a big deal here. And that's why our assumptions are so critical to test. And so that's where the concept of a split test comes into play. A split test is a marketing term for when you run two simultaneous versions of something that you're marketing, at the same exact time, sending half of all people to one version, half of all people to the other version. So this can be done with every single step of the funnel, but let's use the website example. So say I sent half of all of my visitors to version A, which on version A, that's my original assumption, I think that this page is going to work. And then I send half of them to version B, where I've changed something. Now what happens there is you'll find out very quickly, which version performs better. It's kind of like, you know, if you write two versions of the same song, and then you have a listen, have an audience, listen to version one, and have a different audience listen to version two and see which one gets people dancing more, that kind of thing. So you'll find out which one works, and which one doesn't work. And in the marketing world, we measure that in terms of percentages, and that's called the conversion rate. So what percentage of your audience completed the next action on version A, versus what percentage of your audience completed the action on version be? Now for a website? You know, we're not going to expect 100% conversion at any time. That's where Usually not possible. Unless it's extremely far into your funnel, these people have already booked you and you just want them to, I don't know, like, click a button. What is more realistic is in the single digits of percentages. If you send 100 people to your website, you might expect five to 10 of them to give you their email address, so five to 10% conversion rate. And so when you're running a split test, you might see that version A, your original assumption about what will work has a 3% conversion rate. And then you decide, well, I want to test this against something else. I want to try a website where instead of the headline being remember your wedding forever, I want to try a version where the headline instead is, you know, entertain your friends and family, something like that you tweak one thing, and then you run the split test. So now version A still has that 3% conversion rate, because it should convert consistently over time. And then version B, you'll start to get the data in. And all of a sudden, what happens at version B with the different headline converts at 5%. Which, you know, a 2% increase in conversions might not sound like a big deal. But it's a huge deal, you've almost doubled the number of email addresses that you've gotten 3% to 5%. Yeah, it's like just under doubling the amount of email addresses you're getting, which theoretically, will double the number of gigs you get, which is insane how those numbers work, even though they're tiny little numbers seemingly huge impact. So that's the power of a split test. And you run a split test for a while. There are varying schools of thoughts for how, how long to run your split tests, you might run them for as short as a couple of days or as long as a month or even more. Some people say you want to send at least 100 visitors to each version to figure out which version is the better version. And ultimately, you know, you can get really down the rabbit hole with data analysis for all this too. But for all intents and purposes, you'll start to realize, after a couple of days or weeks, which version is going to work better. And so I use this all the time for my group. I'm running a lot of split tests right now on my website, trying to get sorry for that motorcycle, trying to get the conversion rate higher. Right now, my homepage is converting at about 10%, which is great. And that's because of a split test that I'm running right now. But I also test this with the ads that I run, I run different versions of ads, and see which ones get higher click through rates. I also split test different versions of my presentation, seeing which ones cause people to click the secure my date button underneath my presentation better. And so I hope this inspires you. There are a lot of different tools to do this. I know that as a basic WordPress website, this isn't the easiest thing to do. Whereas a tool like ClickFunnels, which is what I'm currently running all my split tests on does make this a lot easier. But there is a higher cost for a tool like ClickFunnels. But you know, it's a powerful tool, doubling my number of bookings will increase double my income effectively. So that's why sometimes it's worth paying more for these tools, because they can save you the time and the energy and the money to implement some of these things, the manual way. So I hope this kind of opened your eyes as to how the music marketing game can be played at an extremely high level and give you insight into some of the tests that I'm running right now in my music business, and start to think about what tests do you want to run in your music business to? So thanks again for listening to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, you are just one gig away