Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 2

August 25, 2010 By Josh Summerhays Leave a Comment

Footloose has another tip to save your conversion program.This is part two in a series of four posts on understanding the realities and challenges of split testing to improve your website’s conversion rate. If you missed part one of the series, you can read it here.

Once you’ve determined that your site gets enough traffic to support a reasonably short testing cycle (if it’s going to take six months, you may want to reevaluate your test), you’re ready to flesh out your testing ideas and go for it. A word to the wise, however:

Coming up with ideas is the easy part. Coming up with good ideas is a little bit harder.

When you catch the bug and get excited about split testing on your website or external landing pages, it will be very easy to jot down a lot of ideas for things you’d like to test.

As you’re compiling these ideas, make sure you’re focused on improving the user experience rather than hoping that “different” will magically equate to “better.” Lance Loveday, conversion expert and co-author of “Web Design for ROI” calls this “testing among good options.” Unfocused testing wastes valuable time and opportunity, so make your tests count!

One of the most common examples of unfocused testing is changing colors – button color, logo color, general Web page color schemes, etc. Once in a while, a color test may be appropriate and effective, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

A good example of an exception in this case would be if the color of a button impedes the ability of a user to easily recognize it on the page or read the button’s call to action. I recently discovered some yellow buttons with white text that were somewhat difficult to read without squinting. In this case, it would be wise to test a darker button color or text color to see if darker buttons would produce a significant lift in click-throughs.

However, it’s a good bet that this sort of test would not be a good idea if you’re thinking, “I’m tired of this light blue. Let’s spice things up and try a deep red instead.” Changing colors purely on the basis of personal aesthetic preference is not likely to make an impact on your website conversion rate.

The Takeaway

You’re more likely to have success testing intelligent changes to elements of your website that have a significant impact on the user experience: your headlines and messaging, page layouts, calls to action, and other elements that impact a visitor’s perception of your benefits and ability to fill needs and add value.

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Split Testing – Knowing is Half the Battle, Part 1

August 13, 2010 By Josh Summerhays Leave a Comment

Footloose stops a nose a bleedI get energized when clients and my SEO colleagues catch the vision of split testing changes to a website. The potential for conversion rate increases is huge, and it’s also great fun!

It’s not all rainbows and fluffy bunnies, however. There are challenges that can sabotage otherwise promising split testing efforts. Awareness of these challenges will help you avoid some of the common pitfalls.

Here’s Part 1 in a four-part series:

Your website needs robust traffic to support a reasonable testing cycle.

If your website is brand new, it’s likely that you don’t have enough traffic to make split testing worthwhile. The more time it takes to complete a split test, the less valid your test result is likely to be because external factors can influence results.

These external factors are things like shifts in market demand (seasonality is a common example of this) and external media factors.

Want to know how long your test might take to reach a valid conclusion? Here’s how to figure it out:

  1. Figure out how many test combinations you want to run. If you want to test one variation, that’s two combinations because you always test against the current version.
  2. Calculate how much traffic per day passes through the test page. More traffic means the test will take less time, everything else being equal.
  3. What percentage of traffic do want to include in the test? Exposing only a fraction of your traffic to the test will reduce the risk of your test negatively impacting revenue, but also increases the amount of time needed for your test.
  4. What is the current conversion rate of this page? Whatever your success metric is, you need to know the performance benchmark you’re trying to beat.
  5. What is your expected rate of improvement? The improvement needs to be high enough to have a measurable impact on your business. If a 10% improvement doesn’t offset the cost of executing the test, you need to aim higher.

Google provides a free test duration calculator that does the complex math for you. Just punch in the numbers to see how many days your test will likely have to run. If you need to decrease the duration, you can choose to run fewer test combinations or increase the percentage of traffic included in the test.

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3 Conversion Busters You Can Easily Fix Today

August 5, 2010 By Josh Summerhays Leave a Comment

frustrated man looking in the fridgeI review several websites every week, analyzing them from the perspective of usability and overall ability to converting traffic to customers/leads.

While a fair amount of businesses out there are getting their act together where online user experience is concerned, I’m constantly amazed by the huge amount of low-hanging conversion optimization fruit still out there on the Dubya-Dubya-Dub.

So I wanted to do you all a favor and give you a quick checklist of simple changes you can make this very day to make life a little bit (or possibly a lotta bit) better for your website visitors, allowing them to more easily give you money:

1. Remove distracting internal links

The fun thing about working with a whole bunch of SEOs (I’m the Conversion guy, remember) is that I get to throw out conversion tips that make SEOs nervous. Part of my job is to point out where SEO tactics are snuffing out conversion, and this is a frequent offender in that regard.

Not all internal links are distracting and should be removed. That would be ridiculous. However, sometimes marketers overdo it and start linking instances of their keyword in places where you wouldn’t want people clicking away from a given page.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most egregious offenders are SEO providers. A cursory examination of the top 10 Google results for any SEO-related keyword will reveal some overzealous linking practices that will have the humans visiting your site – you know, the ones with money to give you – scratching their heads.

For example, one company’s homepage (no screenshot – it’s not how we roll) talks about performance-based SEO work, but before you can even finish one sentence, they have a text link (“guarantee services”) to take you away from the page. Are they really in that big of a hurry to usher me off the page? Of course not – it’s for SEO value, but it’s also potentially tripping up visitors and raising questions that don’t need to be asked, like:

  • “Am I not already reading about your guarantee?”
  • “Is this guarantee different than the one you’re telling me about?”
  • “Is this going to be that complicated that I need to read about this now before I finish on the homepage?”
  • “I’m bugged. What should I get for lunch today?”

Here’s a simple test to see if you might have done this inadvertantly on your website: go read your website copy. When you get to a text link in your copy, ask yourself:

  • Is this link interrupting the conversation?
  • Is it well-timed?
  • Is there a more useful place for this link on this page?
  • When I put this link in originally, was I in a linking frenzy?
  • Do my visitors need the information on the other end of this link before proceeding?

The answers to these questions should indicate whether this link might be counterproductive for your visitors.

Once this post makes it through editorial, it may have a bunch of links and make me look like an idiot, but I’m saying it anyway!

2. Strike down the CAPTCHA

The technology exists for you to filter leads in the background and eliminate spammy leads from your database automatically.

So why in the name of the Ringling Brothers are you still making your site visitors – who have money to give you – jump through hoops to prove that they are humans and not spambots?

Take down the CAPTCHA. Now. Please. Deal with a sprinkling of spam leads until you can get a better solution in place. Your conversion rate will thank you.

3. Link your header logo to the homepage

I still see sites that don’t do this. Huge mistake.

Clicking the logo to get back to the homepage is a usability convention that people get. It’s big and it’s always there. If a visitor wants to switch gears, it’s the easiest way to reset his/her approach to browsing your site. If someone gets stuck and your logo isn’t clickable, it may be the last straw that gets him/her off the computer and looking through the fridge, muttering in frustration.

You might be asking, “Why is this so important? Isn’t it enough to have a “Home” link in my navigation?”

My reply is, Why not do it? Some people will use the “Home” link, but a large portion of your visitors will expect to use the logo. You win both ways, and your site design doesn’t change a bit.

Don’t let them go to the fridge! Link your logo to the homepage and give them another chance to give you money.

~~~~~~

SEO.com has a crack team of conversion experts that can help you convert more of your online traffic into sales – learn more about our conversion optimization services today.


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Interactions – The Hidden Force of Conversion

July 13, 2010 By Josh Summerhays Leave a Comment

interactionsIf Internet buzz is to be believed, lots of marketers are getting excited about this Conversion Optimization stuff.

If you’ve been reading about conversion optimization and are thinking about trying your hand at optimizing your company’s website, let me give you one tip that will save a lot of head-scratching and staring at the floor whilst being grilled by your boss:

Be aware of how your changes may affect the way users perceive and interact with the rest of your site.

In more technical terms, you need to consider how different treatments affect the interactions between your test variable, the rest of that page, and the rest of the website.

Adjust your focus

Many marketers like to think in terms of headlines, images, copy, buttons, layouts. It’s an easy way to approach conversion optimization, but the real power is in the interactions.

Interactions are the relationships between elements on your site that combine to shape customers’ perceptions of your business and products, and influence them to take certain actions consciously or subconsciously.

In order to understand interactions, you have to – brace for the cliché – put yourself in the customer’s shoes. You must be able to experience your own website through the filter of your customers’ experiences and knowledge.

Hypothetical scenario: SuperDuperComputers.com

Here’s what happens when marketers ignore interactions when making website changes:

SuperDuperComputers.com is rolling out a new tablet PC and wants to spread awareness of the product to all online visitors. So they whip up a big banner and stick it on the homepage, front and center. It’s the best product in the universe. The executive team forecasts an increase in online revenue of 50%.

To the dismay of the friendly folks at SDC, site revenue only jumps 5%. Upon closer inspection, the new tablet PC produced the revenue forecasted, so what happened?

The new homepage banner was so flashy and prominent that visitors who would have otherwise clicked through and bought other products were drawn in by the tablet PC banner, decided it wasn’t what they wanted and then abandoned the site.

The marketers involved in this admittedly oversimplified scenario failed to consider the effect that the new banner would have on their other products. The new product would appeal to some potential customers, but certainly not all. Overemphasizing the new product distracted shoppers from finding their ideal solution. Both the customer and company suffered as a result.

The Big Takeaway

How do you avoid making this potentially fatal mistake with your own website?

Look at the big picture. Examine a particular page within the entire context how users discover and interact with it. If changing a particular headline, image or layout a certain way would negatively impact its relevance within the entire funnel, you have three choices:

  1. Optimize the entire funnel – ads, inbound link sources (that you control, of course), and subsequent pages.
  2. Make less dramatic changes to preserve continuity in the funnel.
  3. Find something more flexible to test.

Have any of your tests produced big gains without disrupting vital interactions? Share them here!

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Your Website Visitors Are Talking to You

June 22, 2010 By Nathan Blair Leave a Comment

Continuously improving your Web presence to increase ROI should be the goal, right? OK, but how do you get your potential customers to talk to you so you know what to improve? If you are willing to dig into a little data, you can find out how people interact with your site and where the problems are that need attention. Here are a few pieces of Google Analytics data that you can use to interpret what your visitors are trying to tell you.

Bounce Rate

With a high bounce rate, the visitor is saying, “This site isn’t relevant to me – I’m outta here.” The bounce rate number is just the percentage of single page visits, meaning that all those people left your site without looking past the page they landed on. It’s possible that this means your landing page just isn’t interesting. More likely, it means the people landing on your site were led to believe they would find something different when they clicked on your paid advertisement or organic search listing. If you are getting a high bounce rate, look at what your ads are promising. Make sure your landing page fulfills the promise in the ad.

New vs. Returning Visitors

A high number of returning visitors says, “Your site is engaging enough that I think I’ll come back for more.” New visitors are a good indicator that more people are finding your site, but getting them to return is the part that takes work. Ask yourself what you are putting out there that will bring people back again and again. A really good blog is one great way to do this.

Time on Site

A higher time on site tells you your site keeps visitors from leaving. This could mean you offer plenty of things to explore. But be careful. When I logged into analytics on one of my sites this morning, I found most people were staying for three minutes or so. Then there was this one visit that lasted for three hours. I’m guessing that somebody left their browser open on my site while they left the house for a while. So I obviously didn’t give that visit much attention.

Pages Per Visit

This says, “The first point of contact was interesting enough to make me want to look around.” If you have high average page views, you have done a good job of sending the right people to the site and presenting the information in an interesting way. It might also mean you have created a page structure conducive to further exploration.

Traffic Sources

This is very valuable because it shows you the ways customers come to your site. If they are all coming from Google, then your search engine optimization campaign is working. If you see a huge influx of website traffic from a partner site, you could look into ways to increase your visibility on that partner site.

Content

This is where your visitors tell you which content they like best. You are also able to see how they interact with their favorite content by looking at bounce rate, how many of them left the site from that page, etc. If you notice a certain topic always trends to the top, it should probably be a main focus of your content.

The best companies are those that listen to the customer. Google Analytics provides all this wonderful data to help companies do just that. We just have to be willing to dig in a little.

Image courtesy of BigTallGuy

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