Conversion / Testing

How to Test to Increase Conversions Tim Ash , SiteTuners.com - Aug 23, 2011

There are some in the conversion community who argue over the merits of various kinds of testing approaches and methodologies. While it's true that there are pros and cons to each of the techniques, the argument over which approach is best may intimidate the typical online marketer or website owner into thinking that landing page optimization is either too complicated or too time consuming. In reality, conversion improvements can often be made by combining a bit of brilliance with some inexpensive tools. Once you have a taste of success, you can then begin applying some testing to really amp up your efforts.

Thinking vs. Testing

Let's be clear about one thing up front: not everything should be tested. There likely are obvious things about your landing page that could immediately be changed without any testing at all and result in increased conversions. You can probably think of a few page elements right now that your gut is telling you to change, but you haven't gotten around to it. Many of our clients at SiteTuners.com are in the same boat. They come to us knowing that they've been ignoring their landing pages for too long. One (or more) of these reasons may ring true for you:

• You're too busy and the required changes involve some effort
• You created the landing page(s) in the first place and feel a bit embarrassed
• You are too familiar with the page and can no longer see it through your customers' eyes

Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and start improving your conversions? With no testing at all, here are several avenues you can pursue:

1. Do a best practices review. Often using well-known best practices can quickly eliminate the most glaring problems. Not sure what those are? Read Your Baby Is Ugly -- Learning Objectivity in Website Design and Landing Page Optimization Silver Bullets for a quick primer.
2. Use tools to find problems. Often you may not even be aware of the problems your page has. They come in many flavors including usability, copywriting & messaging, graphic design, value proposition, trust and credibility. There is an explosion of new tools available to help diagnose problems. They include ClickTale.com, CrazyEgg.com, CrossBrowserTesting.com, and AttentionWizard.com, a visual attention prediction tool. Most of these tools are free or very inexpensive.
3. Ask people who are unfamiliar with your site. Often the only reason you can't find problems is that you are too close to them. You may have even had a hand in creating them. Because you are so familiar with your page, you can't see it from the perspective of the naïve and uninterested casual visitor. Doing some informal user testing will give you a wealth of ideas about what is wrong. You just need to sit down three to five people in front of your page and ask them to speak out loud while trying to accomplish the task that you set for them. You can even work with a hand-drawn wireframe or post-it note prototype. Tools like Loop11.com will allow you to recruit online participants and design your own tests. UserTesting.com will quickly and very inexpensively recruit people for you and record their sessions for your review.

Multivariate Testing vs. A-B Split Testing

There are religious wars fought over which testing approach is better. Some people claim that the ease of split testing makes it much more likely to be frequently used. Others swear by the advantages of large-scale multivariate testing.

Split tests have several advantages:

1. Ease of test design. You simply decide how many versions you want to test, and then split the available traffic evenly among them.
2. Ease of implementation. Many content management and software packages support simple split tests.
3. Ease of explanation. No complicated analyses or charts are needed to present your results to others.
4. Useful in low traffic situations. If your landing page only has a few conversions per day, you simply cannot use more advanced tuning methods.

Multivariate testing also has advantages:

1. Ability to try large number of unique pages. Some systems allow you to test millions of page versions if you have enough traffic.
2. Speed of data collection. Running a multivariate test is much faster than running a comparable number of split tests back to back.
3. Taking context into account. Some multivariate tools take context (variable interactions) into account and consider how well combinations of your page elements play together.

If there is enough traffic to run a multivariate test, try this two phase approach:

Phase 1: Radical split test. In whole-page split tests, you have complete flexibility in how different the proposed alternatives are. For example, in one alternative, you may simply choose to test a different headline. In another you may completely restructure everything about the page (layout, color scheme, sales copy, offer, and call-to-action). This ability to mix and match allows you to test a range of evolutionary and revolutionary alternatives in one test, without being constrained by the more granular definition of variables in a multivariate test. By trying several distinct versions, you can uncover which overall complete design works the best. Most of your conversion gain will probably happen here.

Phase 2: Follow-up multivariate test. Once you have the best basic framework for your landing page, you can begin fine-tuning by conducting a multivariate test on the details of the page. It's almost impossible to predict which headline, photo or button color combination will work best. But you can cycle through many possible combinations of page features to find the best one. This follow up test will squeeze a little extra conversion “juice” out of your basic design.

Whether you are new to conversion optimization or have been tuning your site for years, take a holistic approach to your efforts. Use a bit of brilliance combined with a blend of the right testing techniques to get the best results out of your landing page optimization program. To ignore any of the available tools or approaches would be akin to playing golf with only a single club in your bag. and would be equally likely to produce a good outcome. The important thing is to tee up and start the game!

Tim Ash is the CEO of SiteTuners.com, a landing page optimization firm that offers conversion consulting, full-service, guaranteed-improvement tests, and software tools to improve conversion. SiteTuners' unique AttentionWizard.com visual attention simulation software tool can be used on a landing page screenshot or mock-up to quickly identify major conversion issues. Tim has worked with many leading companies and is a highly-regarded speaker at Internet marketing conferences. He is a contributing columnist to several industry publications and is the author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization.