When improving website conversion rates through testing and optimization, understanding the why is critical. The why is at the top level of insight that we as designers and marketers need to continuously strive to get to. True insight from any testing and optimization comes from an understanding of what specific variable in your test made the difference. What was it that caused the lift in conversion rate, or the dip? Was it the headline, the button, the product image? What was it that you can point to and bring to your boss and say – Here. This did that and the impact was this in real money to the bottom line.

Knowing the why in any conversion rate optimization test for both positive gains and decreases means we can then begin to get closer to predictability. We can make changes in the future to generate consistent results. This is the holy grail of conversion rate optimization, but it is not always what we should be striving for. Often times when it comes to testing and improving conversion rates, businesses do not have the luxury of time.

Sometimes a business needs results and they need them fast. In such a situation it may be less important to know exactly which particular test variable contributed to the impact of improvement and it may be more important to just simply increase results. This is not the dogma of the scientific method but from a business perspective it makes sense.

Sometimes the business need outweighs the needs of science. We’re not living in a lab with white coats and precise measurement tools. We’re building e-commerce sites and living in the trenches of online conversion rates. To get closer to understanding the why we need to conduct systematic tests, changing only one element at a time or conduct very strict multivariate tests, which require a considerable amount of traffic in order to be statistically valid and a disciplined thought process.

For such a situation, where traffic in terms of visits is not all that high to conduct anything other than an A/B test. The business pain is high and results are required fast. Or upper management buy-in to the idea of conversion rate optimization or testing is low and you need a quick win. It’s OK to enter the world of testing and improvement without solving for the why. In such a situation you’re strictly solving for improvement. Your conversion rate optimization philosophy needs to shift in order to focus on the biggest gains possible. The best chance of reaching those big double, and triple digit improvements is to approach your testing in a radically different way. Changing one element at a time will beyond a shadow of a doubt tell you if that particular element improved your goal or not but you’ll most likely experience minor gains at best, in the range of a few percentage points. Taking a different approach however can lift your conversion rates in the triple digit range and beyond. To get the 100+% improvements your test page needs to be drastically different from your control page. Think of your test variable in this case as your entire page rather than simply 2 versions of the headline. There is a time and place in your testing plan to get more granular and bring it back to understanding the why but in the situation described previously your best chance for wind improvements is going to be found in wildly different test pages.

If you’d like to further discuss conversion optimization testing philosophy please contact me, (bobby @ creativethirst dot com) I’d be more than happy to chat.

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