When often faced with a choice, any choice most people choose to do nothing. Our brains are hard wired through evolution to protect us. Our deep-rooted caveman brain sees change as unsafe and keeps us from doing anything different that what we have already done in the past. When we need more online results we do what we have always done, buy more traffic.

Wasn’t it Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and expecting different results?

This is what most marketers do every day. They buy more traffic, through different means of acquisition and expect different results. More traffic means more potential sales right? The part of our brains that protect us is afraid to do anything different. Marketing acquisition is what we have always done, and more traffic is fundamentally good right?. It has become a natural reflex for most marketers at this point. Your marketing budget has been allocated to traffic building and you’re probably doing a lot of other tactical stuff on the SEO traffic driving side, so why stop? More traffic will always be a part of Internet marketing, without traffic there are no sales.

What our caveman brains are not letting us see is that there is a better way. There is a way to work smarter not harder and increase sales without increasing traffic. That answer if you haven’t guessed it by now is conversion rate optimization. The art and science of improving and testing your website to deliver higher returns and more profit by increasing your conversion rate not your traffic numbers.

Let’s take an honest look and peel back some layers of fear, uncertainty and doubt and try to reason with the caveman brain.

Let’s say your website converts visitors at a rate of 2% any you’re currently bringing in 5,000 unique visitors through paid traffic with an average of $100 revenue per conversion.

At a 2% conversion rate you’d have 100 conversions that would generate $10,000 in total sales. Now let’s say you increased the amount of paid traffic to your site by an additional 1,000 unique visitors, with all other things being equal. A 2% conversion rate would give you 120 total conversions with $12,000 in total sales. Not too shabby, but remember the extra 1,000 unique visitors came at a cost, and that cost is a recurring cost if you want to keep those sales figures up each, week.

Now let’s look at an alternative to spending more and more money on traffic.

What if you increased your conversion rate but kept the same amount of traffic? If you just increased your conversion rate by a half of a percent 0.5% with the same amount of  unique visitors as before 5,000 and an average of $100 in revenue per conversion, that small lift in conversion rate of 0.5% would generate a total of 125 conversions (5 conversions more than getting 1,000 more people to your site) and a total of $12,500 in total sales. Even if you paid twice as much than you did on bringing in more traffic to improve your conversion rate by a mere half a percent, you would sustain that higher conversion rate over time. Giving you more conversions and more sales over and over, month after month without the cost of continuously feeding more and more traffic, over and over again. But imagine what your total sales would look like once you added more traffic to a site that was converting sales at a higher percentage than you’re converting now.

I’m not going to lie to you, it’s bad enough that our brains are hard wired to keep us in the dark and resist change. Not all change is good and jumping into conversion rate optimization with your eyes closed is no way to expand your mind or your conversion rate. You deserve to know the full story. There is a dark side to conversion that very few people talk about. Again let’s peel back another layer and take a look at some hard truth.

Truth #1 - Conversion rate optimization is not a quick fix. It is not as simple as turning up traffic. Conversion rate optimization deals with the mind of your visitors. Conversion does not happen on web sites, it happens in the mind of your prospect. It is critical to understand your prospect and the psychological triggers of the buying process to get it right quickly.

Truth #2 - Conversion rate optimization may take time. If you jump in blind without knowing what to improve or how to properly conduct a valid test that will tell you with at least a 95% confidence level that the improved version of your web page will consistently perform at that higher level then you may be increasing your conversion rates temporarily. It is vitally important to understand how to conduct a proper conversion test.

Truth #3 – It may sometimes take one step back to take three steps forward. You may not always get it right the first time, no matter how well you think you know your customer. There are a lot of factors involved in conversion rate improvement, including usability, design, motivation, etc. with so many moving parts you are not the best judge of success before something is tested. The final outcome is in the hands of your visitors, it is up to them to decide. However, with every test you learn something that can help you improve the next time.

Truth #4 – Conversion rate optimization requires consistency and dedication. To truly implement a conversion rate optimization strategy takes a commitment to testing and continuous improvement. Improvement and testing is not a one time fix. Each website is different and how high you improve your conversion rates is up to how much time and dedication you are willing to put into testing and improvement.

It is now up to you. Will you continue to settle for the same conversion rates you currently have? Will you overcome the part of your brain that wants to keep the status quo and continue to do what you have always done, bring in more traffic and hope for the best? Or cay you resist your own brain and gain improvements you never thought possible? The choice is yours, but I vote for conversion rate optimization.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blatantnews/ / CC BY 2.0

Why should someone buy from you? That is one of the top three vital questions every website needs to answer within the first five seconds of a visitors arrival on your site.

According to Ellen Langer Harvard social psychologist it is a well-known principle of human behavior that when people ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we give them a reason rather than just simply ask. In fact Langer conducted a study in which the conversion rate was a whopping 94% in favor of providing reasons. 94% of people in the study complied with the favor asked compared to 60% when no reason why was given for the same favor.

The persuasion principle of providing reasons why applies to improving your online conversion rates as well. From the perspective of a product that is being sold online. It is not enough to simply list the benefits and features of the product and hope your visitor clicks the buy button. You have to give reasons why your prospect should buy.

So how do you do this online?

The answer that just about every single marketing book out there gives in answer to that question is that you have to develop a strong USP.

USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition, which means you should promote a benefit of your product that identifies you as being different from all your competitors. USP is what makes your product different.

But just being different is not enough anymore in a world of so many products to persuade visitors to buy. Consumers have infinite choices and options to choose from online and even more websites that sell that same product.

We all want to be different, but the problem with simply developing a strong USP is that it’s not in-line with the buyer. A USP is focused on you, your product or your website. USPs are seller driven. As the name implies, they boast the selling of your product. They push the sales message and shove the reasons why your product is different down the wallets of your prospects. Providing reasons why is a common persuasion tactic, and as the study reveals it does have a positive impact on conversion rates which is why so many marketing gurus raise the USP flag and tout the importance of developing one. But there is something even stronger and more powerful than a USP. The VP sometimes referred to as the UVP or the Unique Value Proposition.

The reason why the UVP is more powerful than a USP is that a value proposition shifts the focus from the seller to the buyer. The value proposition is not about what makes the product unique, it’s not about pushing the message. It’s about pulling the buyer into the process. The process of buying vs. selling.

Your prospect has one main concern, them. Not you. Not your product. Them and only them not what makes your product unique. A Value proposition puts the focus on them. What value will your product provide to help them solve their problem?

Here’s an example
A USP might be – Contains Dual Acting Stain Remover, To Get Tough Stains Out.

That sounds great but it does not add value for the buyer. It speaks about the product alone with a feature that makes it unique, it contains dual acting stain remover. The USP tries to add a benefit statement that qualifies the feature with – To get tough stains out. But this USP still, like all USPs focuses too much on the selling side and not the buyers side.

You need to sell the value not the benefits or features. Lets take a look at how we can save this and make it a more powerful value proposition.

A UVP might be – Remove Tough Stains With Only 1 Wash

Do you see how that shifts the focus to the value the customer will get with the product rather than what makes it different than the other products?

To create value propositions you must start with a few questions.

1. What problem is your prospect trying to solve?
2. Does your value proposition speak directly to the problem?
3. What is the impact to your customer?
4. Does your value proposition show evidence and support in the form of quantitative information?

Photo Credit: by Sir Millard Mulch. Used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spine/ / CC BY 2.0

Even if people are not fully aware of it, they think about things based on what surrounds them, like a picture in a grand elegant gold frame. Suddenly that picture becomes more elegant and takes on the characteristics of the frame around it. If this works for pictures would it work for other things?

For years advertising agencies have been trying to tap into the mental models of customers by focusing on the old marketing acronym AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. There is certainly a time and place for that tried and true formula. Every website needs to capture the attention of qualified visitors, peek their interest and desire and get them to take action and convert to a sale.

However, where agencies and marketers usually fall short is only focusing on creating awareness and framing. Awareness is a necessary part of any marketing strategy and every website needs visitors to be aware of them in order to get traffic. Framing aligns your product or service with a certain feeling or a particular set of attributes, which is also important in the grand scheme of your brand.

Focusing on just awareness (getting more traffic) and framing (look and feel) will only match your offline marketing campaigns which is far too often all any web designer has to work with. The marketing department is so caught up in a command and control environment they often can’t see beyond just matching the offline print and or television campaign online.

Online marketing however is a different beast entirely. Simply harmonizing your website with your print campaign only deals with framing your product in a certain light and is only one of several powerful tools that can be used to get more sales and conversions. In other mediums like print and TV framing is simply all that you can really do effectively. Other mediums are not interactive and can’t take the ball and run with it to further the sale or even close the sale like a website can.

Because marketers just want to match the offline campaign for brand consistency sake, they are missing out on more sales and higher conversion rates. Don’t get me wrong I fully support brand consistency but there is a lot more that a website can do than simply match the message along with the look and feel and add a call to action button. It’s sad that most websites are still thinking like online brochures. Brochure websites are still an epidemic and so many websites are leaving money on the table because they see the web as a magazine or TV ad with a buy button.

Websites need to do what ad agencies and marketing campaigns can’t do to fill the gap. They need to move beyond look and feel and help visitors make decisions to take action. This is the heart of what conversion rate marketing and persuasive web design is all about, help visitors buy.

This is a completely different approach than simply concentrating on just look and feel or framing. Persuasive web design pulls directly from consumer psychology and mental models, which is where framing comes from but it goes much deeper. It’s more than just visual, it’s verbal too, more in lines with an internal dialog with the visitor and your website in the form of links that pull visitors through an optimized path for buying. By combining design with psychological triggers like scarcity, social proof, reciprocity, consistency and more websites can begin to design the buying process not just the colors and look of your website.

Photo Credit: Gold Picture Frame by Goldener Bilderrahmen. used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eriwst/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Do you remember what it was that got you to purchase the last item you bought online? It was probably one of only several reasons and you probably weren’t even fully aware of your reasons why. If it’s this difficult to know why you yourself buy, imagine how difficult it is to understand why someone else would buy from you.  You may think you know why someone is buying from your website but are you really sure? There is a process that customers unconsciously go through in their mind before, during and after they purchase. If you understood this process and knew the reasons why people buy from you, it should be easy to sell more right?

Now hold on a second. I can already hear what you’re going to say. People buy from a website because it has the lowest price. Yes price can be a factor in certain purchases, but don’t let price stop you from selling more. You may have bought from a particular website because of price but price probably wasn’t the underling reason you bought that particular product.

“A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.”
- William Feather

It’s so easy to shop for the best price online and it’s becoming easier offline too with the mobile web and advanced applications and functionality of some phones. But price is only one factor in a myriad of psychological triggers and functionality of online stores. Just imagine, being able to tap into your potential prospects subconscious mind and seeing those wheels turn. How much would you pay to know exactly what it was that got them to take out their credit card and hit that buy button? And how much more would they buy?

When you really step back and look at the buying process it doesn’t matter what the product is or who your prospect is. Underneath it all we’re just people and it doesn’t matter if we’re buying online or not we’re all subject to the same rules of humanity.

Fundamentally, there are 26 different reasons why people buy:

1.    To make money
2.    To save money
3.    To save time
4.    To avoid effort
5.    To be more comfortable
6.    To achieve greater cleanliness
7.    To be more healthy
8.    To escape physical pain
9.    To gain praise
10.    To be popular
11.    To attract the opposite sex
12.    To conserve possessions
13.    To increase enjoyment
14.    To gratify curiosity
15.    To protect their family
16.    To be in style
17.    To have beautiful possessions
18.    To satisfy appetite
19.    To emulate others
20.     To avoid trouble
21.    To avoid criticism
22.    To be an individual or express their individualism
23.    To protect their reputation
24.    To take advantage of opportunity
25.    To have the feeling of safety
26.    To make work easier

Now that you have a view under the hood of the buying mind, your job is to tap into one or several mental buying triggers, or reasons why people buy, and apply them to sell more. Which of these buying reasons tie to your customers and products? If you’re not sure run a simple online survey and get insight from the only person that really matters, your customer. But don’t stop there, look back at the 26 reasons and ask how you can add some of them to your selling process, you’ll be surprised at how much more you can sell when you do this effectively.

Just remember the key to effectively applying this is to tie it into your selling process holistically. Think of it like a tapestry, where one strand of thread is weaved together to make the whole. The buying reasons that are most appropriate to your customers needs to be weaved throughout your website, not just simply on the product page. Weave buying reasons in your headlines, your calls to action, your images, every element needs to support and tie into the whole. The reasons why people buy may be simple but applying them is part art and science. Remember, a website is a living-breathing thing, keep experimenting and testing to learn what works for your customers.

In the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Chip and Dan Heath describe the curse of knowledge. Simply stated when we know too much about a particular thing that knowledge keeps us from seeing what is wrong with it or how to improve it. This is particularly true when it comes to conversion rate optimization. Both marketers and designers are often too close to their websites. From a users perspective, they know exactly how to navigate their own sites and repeatedly take this for granted when in reality there may be uncovered opportunities for conversion improvement with usability testing. From a customers perspective marketers know their products inside and out and often replace the voice of the customer with their own opinion or what they think are the opinions of their customers. In both scenarios we’re too close to the problem and we suffer from the curse of knowledge.

Avoid the curse of knowledge with unbiased outside opinions. Here are three easy and quick solutions that you can implement today to get instant feedback from real unbiased users.

Feedbackarmy.com
This is a great site where you can get simple, cheap usability testing for your website. Just come up with 3 to 6 questions and for $10 bucks you can get 10 responses within 2 – 3 hours. No better way to get feedback for as low as the price of lunch.

Fivesecondtest.com
This is exactly what it says, tests in five seconds. They offer two types of tests, memory tests and click tests, and they literally take 3 minutes to set up. There is a premium option but you can run as many free tests as you like.

Memory Test
You see a web page for 5 seconds then you list the 5 things you remember. This is a great way for marketers to see if that call to action is really standing out.

Click Test
You are presented a web page and asked to click on the one thing that stands out the most, then are given a text box to enter what that thing is. You’d be surprised at how often a promotion looks like a banner ad to a visitor.

Five second tests help you identify the most important elements on a page easily, ingeniously and super duper fast.

Usertesting.com
Usertesting.com offers low cost usability testing that lets you watch and hear real people as they are using your website. This is the closest thing to an in person usability test that I’ve seen. For $29 bucks you get a video of the user clicking through your site with their toughts in audio as they browse your site and a written summary.  You can even choose the demographics of the users you want. Including age, gender, income, etc. 5 users only cost $126

These are in no way replacements to a true one on one user test but they are great additions to explore before conducting a more in-depth usability test or a professional conversion rate optimization specialist. Conversion rate optimization and Usability testing are both in-depth robust fields of study and these tools simply scratch the surface but they are a great way to get your feet wet, get some great information you can act on immediately and begin to break the curse of knowledge.

Good conversion rate marketing is like exercising. We go to the gym one day and we feel great while we’re there, we’re just happy we showed up and we’re ready to workout. We pick up the weights and get on that treadmill and we’re rocking. We feel fantastic. We hit the showers and head back home with a sense of accomplishment and mentally commit to exercising two to three times a week. Then the next morning comes and we’re soar then another day passes and another and soon we realize it’s been a week since we’ve been to the gym.

Conversion rate marketing is the same way. We know it’s the right thing to do. If your conversion rate is 3% that means 97% of that hard-earned traffic is wasted. Conversion rate optimization will decrease our cost per acquisition and increase our sales, leads, etc. Our marketing budget will be buff and more efficient. Yet just like consistently exercising, it’s hard work. We start out with the best intentions and commit to improving our conversion rate through continuous testing. Maybe we even get through that first test or two but just like going back to the gym, other things get in the way and we find it’s been months since we’ve done anything. Optimizing your website for improvement takes dedication and work. It’s not just about throwing up ideas to see what works. That will take forever to get results and no business has that much time to commit. Successful conversion rate marketing takes asking tough questions over and over to get to the heart of what to versions to run in an A/B or multivariate test.

One of the things that will boost your conversion rate through the roof is clearly expressing your value proposition. Usually that’s also the hardest one to get right but just like exercising if you keep at it and continue to ask the tough questions over and over again, even after you think you’ve got it, ask again and again. Just like walking or jogging on that treadmill you can’t just do it once and expect to get any long-term benefits from it. Improvement is a constant struggle against our own comfort level, so here are some tough questions for you to start asking and thinking about today and tomorrow and next week and next month and beyond.

1. Why do you think each customer type chooses to buy your product?
2. What problems is your customer trying to solve by purchasing your product?
3. Describe the typical customers current situation before buying your product.
4. Why should a prospect buy from you?
5. Why should a prospect trust you and your solution?

Anything worth perusing takes hard work and the dedication to keep at it consistently over time. It may be difficult at first and there may be many obstacles in your way, including your company culture or the belief that it’s the right thing to do. When you’re ready, start asking yourself and others in your organization the tough questions. You may find yourself at dead ends and people in your group or company may squirm and feel uncomfortable with some of the questions because they don’t know the answers. That’s OK. Remember it’s just like exercising, it get’s easier over time if you keep at it and that’s when you’ll find your company getting better at it as well.

Photo Credit: All Man by luluemon Athletica. used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lululemonathletica/ / CC BY 2.0

Which do customers find more attractive, 40% OFF or $5.00 OFF? A study conducted in the July 2007 issue of Journal of Marketing research asks that exact question.

The research discovered that customers are more persuaded by a percentage off vs. a dollar amount. This makes sense from a persuasive design perspective. Simply put, the number 40 is bigger than the number 5 in 40% off vs. $5.00 off.

Yes it really is that simple.

Offering a specific dollar amount off of a product with a coupon can change a customer’s perception of the product’s value. When buyers are presented with a percentage discount, a specific bargain price doesn’t ever enter their mind. Where as a specific dollar amount off like, the $5.00 OFF offer creates a specific dollar amount comparison to the total cost of the product. The discount could be the exact same dollar discount, but the percentage will be perceived as bigger. (Obviously that is dependent on the total price of your product.) Customers simply won’t do the math (with the exception of 10 percent or 50 percent offers, where the calculations are easier) and therefore, the percentage off seems like a greater savings to most shoppers.

We can also see the same persuasion perception happen on offers that are stated as a percentage range like. 20 – 50% OFF. Psychologically people have a tendency to assume they will get the lowest discount and think they will get 20% off not 50% or any range in-between. Perhaps consumers have developed a thick skin from years of being marketed to or maybe most people are pessimists, I’m not sure. Either way there are some significant insights you can take away and apply to online conversion rate marketing.

Don’t believe me? One easy way to apply this principle online is to conduct an A/B split test for an adwords campaign. Simply run two separate consecutive ad tests through ad words.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Choose a one week 7 day period that does not have any holidays in it and run version one of your ad copy with 20 – 50% OFF.
2. Immediately follow up that test for another 7 days again with no holidays in this 7 day run and be sure to include the same days as the previous test (Thursday through Wednesday vs. Thursday through Wednesday, etc.) and run version two of your ad copy with the 50% OFF offer.

Your success metric for this test will be the (CTR) Click Through Rate. CTR = total clicks / total impressions. Think of the CTR as a visitor converting from your ad to your landing page. CTR is a the proper metric for this test since your testing variable is the ad copy not the landing page or final sale. You simply want to find which offer drives the most traffic to your landing page.

Here are some examples on how to use the percentage discount offer in your ad words ad.

20 – 50% OFF Shoes
Great Deals on Clearance Items. 20 – 50% OFF Sale items won’t last. Shop Now.

Vs.

50% OFF Shoes
Great Deals on Clearance Items. 50% OFF Sale items won’t last. Shop Now.

In this example the only variable was the discount price since we are testing to answer both the which and the what. Which AdWords Ad will generate the highest CTR and What element can we attribute the difference to. Depending on your test goals, time, resources and business goals you may not always be concerned with answering what element attributed to the difference. Some times the most important thing is getting the highest conversion rate increase as quickly as possible.

You can also conduct the same test with a percentage discount vs. a dollar amount (40% OFF vs. $5.00 OFF) as the variable. You may be surprised at what works for your prospects, it’s not always the most obvious or what would be the best offer to you. Remember, your customers don’t think like you do. As I say to all my clients, let’s test it.

The question I get asked a lot by companies looking to increase their conversion rates is, how do we know what to test? Some conversion rate marketing experts will tell you to test everything, but that’s very naive. No company can test everything. Although there will never be a shortage of ideas to test, the truth is testing takes time, money and resources. Every business has to balance these three in everything they choose to do. Testing is no different. Even in a business with an experimental culture that dedicates their life to continuously improving their marketing conversion rate will never get to test everything. There is always something new and different to test and tune for optimal performance.

More companies should adopt a culture of experimentation and testing. What CEO doesn’t want to increase results? Unfortunately human nature and ego gets involved in decision-making and no one wants to be wrong. To be truly successful you must learn to fail fast and often. In testing there is no failure only feedback. The feedback of your designer, CEO, director of marketing, etc. are all meaningless to the feedback of your customers and prospects. Let them vote with their click and test, test, test until you get it right.

So where should you start? You’re ready to make some improvements with conversion rate optimization. Everyone in your company is excited and can’t wait to get started including you but you’re not sure where to start your first test.

Let’s tackle the question of what to test in two parts. First, let’s look at how to choose what page or pages to test and then what elements on that page to test.

How to choose the best page to start testing

If this is the first test within your organization stay clear of all sacred cow pages. These are the pages that someone in your company, usually in a higher position than you, has a personal stake in. Perhaps they had a considerable stake in the final look of the page, or it’s just on their list of pet peeves. If your CEO is in love with the home page, let him be happy, for not anyway. There is no better way than to kill a conversion rate optimization campaign than to prove the CEO wrong with a better performing sacred cow page. You’re going to need to get a quick win with your first test so that you will be allowed to continue with follow-up tests and expand to other pages on your site, and maybe eventually come back around to that sacred cow page.

Don’t let your curiosity get out of control. Every effort towards conversion rate optimization needs to be driven by a business goal. Time and resources are just too precious to test anything that is outside the circle of the business needs.  Every test should start with a “which” question. Which page is bringing in the highest revenue? No other question is going to get your CMO and CEO excited at the same time. The answer to this question will be different for each website and each business model, let’s look at a few.

For an Ecommerce site your business model is driven by selling stuff. There’s a ton of things to test on an Ecommerce site and your first reaction might be to think the shopping cart would be the page that brings in the highest revenue, and there is usually a lot of opportunity for conversion rate optimization at the shopping cart level. But since you’re just getting started and this is your first test the shopping cart is a big nut to crack and I wouldn’t want to have your first test killed by the IT or web development department because of the complexity of the shopping cart page. Remember it’s all about gaining internal trust for your first test so you can do more tests and move the bottom line to get that corner office someday.

So what other page besides the shopping cart is bringing in the most revenue? The answer is the detail page of your best selling product. Here’s my thought process, in order to get the product into your shopping cart the step before it gets added is most likely the detail page. It’s the step above the cart in the conversion funnel.

For a subscription site, revenue is driven by people signing up. The page to test on this type of site is your registration page or your squeeze page where your visitor chooses which subscription level is right for him.

For a content site revenue may be tied to advertising. In which you’ll need to take a look into your web analytics to see which pages have the highest views, or average time on page. A quick talk with the ad sales department can also help you to find out which type of ads on your site have the highest CPM ad revenue.

You may also wan tot take a look at the top pages with the highest exit rates for a content site. This is an indication of which pages may need some help with visitor engagement. Or pages with high bounce rates to find which are performing poorly. Using bounce rate and exit rates to start your marketing optimization with can be tricky since there are more factors involved like motivation and what channels visitors were driven to your site from.

How to choose what elements to test

As stated earlier there should be no shortage of ideas here, if there are just email me bobby at creativethirst dot com for some ideas. But as before it depends on the type of website. But here are the top three elements to test on any type of site.

The Page Headline – Headlines are where you can usually get your biggest bang for your optimization buck. Visitors in your marketing funnel need to be sold to at each step of your funnel. Your page headline is where you express the value proposition and the reason why they should get your conversion.

The Call to Action – It doesn’t make sense that a webpage designed for a prospect to complete an action would make it difficult for a visitor to do but more often than not that’s exactly the case. Calls to action are hidden, small, not obvious (too hard to see because of lack of contrast, things that don’t look like buttons or links) and a host of other marketing sins that are cast upon them. It amazes me how calls to action are almost always an afterthought to design.

The Page Layout – The page itself is a complex element because it contains so many smaller elements that combine to do one big job of conversion. Most page layouts although well executed as a page don’t take into account conversion. Each page is extremely complex when it comes to the psychology of the page and conversion but the main take away would be to test single column and double column landing pages. The biggest thing to remember is the thought process in the mind of your visitor when designing page layout.

Each one of these three elements are intertwined broadly with some action on your page no matter what type of site you have.

The job of website optimization is never done. Websites are never finished products. They are living breathing things that change constantly because the world in which they exists is in a constant state of change. As web marketers we must constantly challenge the status quote and endlessly improve and learn.

Photo Credit: Thinking RFID by Jacob Botter. used under Creative Commons License.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/ / CC BY 2.0

When in comes to conversion rate optimization there is no failure only feedback. Testing is the key to getting to what works best for your prospects and visitors. All too often someone within your organization thinks they know what is best. Perhaps it is your design team, chief marketing officer or even your CEO. The brutally honest truth is that none of them know. They may be following best practices or concepts that have worked in case studies they’ve read but until you test you will never know for sure what truly works for your customers.

With free testing tools like Google Website Optimizer there is no reason not to test. Every marketer should always be in the middle of at least one test on their website at any given time. There just aren’t any excuses for not testing. Testing is how we improve.

Two of the most common online testing methods are the A/B test and the multivariate test. Here’s a plain English explanation of each that you can take to your boss to get the testing ball in your organization moving in the right direction.

A/B Testing
In an A/B test there are two versions of a web page, version A and version B. Version A is usually the control page, or the existing page and version B is the alternative page. The winning version becomes the control page in a follow-up test against another alternative.

Half of the traffic sees version A and the other half sees version B until each version has enough traffic and enough conversions (that’s the goal of the particular page you are testing and the goal should be the same for both versions) has been gathered for the test to be statistically valid for a wining version to be declared.

An A/B test is the most common and easiest type of test. It’s a great place to start with testing and it gives you the largest range of possibility. If you have a specific landing page that you’re driving traffic to from a channel like pay per click adwords start with an A/B test.

The advantages of an A/B test is that it allows you to complete freedom to come up with a totally different page version to test against the control. Which means you can try wild solutions in order to get the biggest gains. You’ll also get the fastest results with an A/B test since there are only two versions. Version A and version B, even though version B can be completely different than version A.The more versions of a page the longer a test needs to run and the more traffic it needs to be declared a statistically valid winner.

Multivariate Testing
In a multivariate test there are several versions of one or more elements on a single page. The combination of theses elements are what’s being tested. An element can be anything, an image, a headline, the words on the page, a call to action button, etc. For example let’s say you have 3 different headlines you thought might increase the conversion rate of the page along with 2 different images and 4 different call to action buttons.

So you have 3 different elements in this test, the headline, the image and the call to action button. Your testing tool such as Google Website Optimizer would pull in each element to make up every combination. In this example there would be 24 different combinations or versions of this test page. 3 x 2 x 4 = 24 (3 headlines x 2 images x 4 buttons) With each different version a visitor would see only one combination of elements. This is what’s known as a full factorial experiment.

The advantages of a multivariate test is that it’s much more granular with different combinations of elements you can really get specific, not only with each element but also the combination of elements. The disadvantage is that it requires more traffic to achieve statistically valid results since there are more than 2 versions and it can easily get out of hand with the amount of versions as in the example we had 24 different versions of the page.

In conclusion, each type of test is dependent on the needs of the business and the goals of the page. The important thing to remember is that testing is not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing effort for continuous improvement. Remember this is just a basic overview of these two types of tests, we’re just scratching the surface of this very broad and deep topic.

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With so many tools for generating data about web visitors, what they clicked, when they clicked how long they stayed before clicking away. Are we being drowned in a sea of data? With so much data it is vitally important to never separate the numbers from the activity of the visitors behind them. It’s simply too easy to have reports spit out at us that don’t become actionable tasks and insights. Simply put, when the numbers in a business loose their connection to people and an action the numbers become useless.

Connecting the data to people and personas keeps us firmly grounded in the mind of the customer. The key to knowing what action to take from your data is the ability to draw insight from the numbers. A lot of time those insights touch on our best guess in relation to a behavior we’re seeing based on the numbers. How we derive on those insights are key to improvements that often push us far beyond what we would have accomplished had we been more rigid in our model of thinking. This often means the difference between double digit and often triple digit gains as opposed to single or point digit conversion improvements.

We often get too caught up in knowing the what. What exactly was it that got that x% gain? When in business the lift is what is important and the higher the lift the better. Although there is a place for the what that may come later if allowed.

To gain true insight and push the lift into the double and triple digit lift we need to start thinking in a different way.

Traditionally there are three types of logic models that people use to draw such insights, essentially ways of thinking. The three models are, Induction, deduction and abduction.

Induction is the model of inferring what is probable as a result of observing. Inferring that a requires b. This is the kind of thinking that is used in a one on one usability test because you are a direct observer to a single user. It tells you a lot of the overall problems of your site and it may get you some conversion rate lifts based on fixing usability alone. Starting out here is not a bad place to begin but if you’re serious about long term improvements through conversion rate optimization you wont want to stay in this type of mindset for too long.

Deduction is the ability to derive an assumption. Deriving b as a consequence of a. This gets us closer to understanding the what. However if used too early in your testing and conversion rate optimization strategy you’ll most likely be stuck in small fraction of a digit gains at best with a little luck. Most companies are not patient enough for small gains and most businesses require more revenue.

Abduction logic is what might be. It’s the ability to see this and think that might be the following. It is inferring a as an explanation of b. This is very close to the concept of lateral thinking developed by Edward deBono. Abduction logic and lateral thinking is the type of thinking behind problem solving through a creative indirect approach.

Both Lateral Thinking and Abductive Logic are about logical deduction that is not immediately obvious through a step-by-step approach to thinking. It requires you to fill in the gaps with your best guess. This is where your landing page is going to get the biggest lifts in conversion. With wild out of the box radical redesign thinking that is grounded in the mind of the customer that connects the data to the people.

Any good conversion rate optimization strategy needs to include abductive lateral thinking at first to gain the most lift and then double back around to the what question as a method of fine tuning your conversion lift.

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