When you are ‘scientifically testing’; you are testing a hypothesis or idea.

The hypothesis is generally formed around an idea you have and something you want to learn about your customers.

For instance, you might try adding a 10% discount to your products. However, when you sell at a discount, you need to make up for it in more total orders to offset the lower price. So your hypothesis could be as basic as:

We believe that adding a 10% discount to our goods will increase conversion rates by 15% and the net revenue increase will be greater than $10,000. To test this, we will start off by offering a discount on a limited selection of products and echo the discount in the ads and landing pages.

The hypothesis could be based upon a new business milestone: We’ve now sold more than 1 million tickets. We want to test if the credibility of adding “more than 1 million tickets sold” to our ads performs better than our current call to action “Call for quick, personal assistance”.

The possibilities are endless; but here are some ideas to get you started:

• Prices vs discounts
• Geography vs non-geography
• Call to action vs benefits
• Different benefit statements
• Large selection vs custom products
• Pre-qualifications for B2B traffic
• Business credibility vs easy-to-accomplish
• Keyword insertion vs static lines
• Ad customizers vs static lines
• Ad customizers vs ad customizers
• Countdowns vs limited availability

Once you have determined what to test, the next step is determining the scale of the test.