Sometimes the best way to understand how to think about improving web conversion is to walk through an evaluation of an actual landing page. Today I’d like to walk you through my approach to landing page web conversion and evaluate the website www.heyviv.com, this site sells vintage 1950’s clothing to two different groups, costumers (for example student plays, Halloween, etc.) and vintage clothing collectors. Check out the site for yourself if you are in one of these two groups, the quality and authenticity of the products are top notch.

Before evaluating any landing page it’s important to understand the upstream traffic of where visitors are coming from, how the landing page is being used. What I mean by upstream is the click right before the visitor gets to your landing page, where did they come from? What are the primary the traffic sources for your page?

This landing page is being used in a few different ways:
1. As a page within the flow of the website from a “Costume Help” link
2. As a landing page from a Google AdWords search ad
3. As a page sent from email correspondence with existing and prospective customers answering questions to people who are doing a 1950’s style show or play.

By understanding where traffic is coming from we can get a better idea of what the visitors needs and motivations might be in order to see the page through their eyes.

In each case the visitor is coming from a different place upstream and has different expectations, motivations and needs. So for each point upstream the intent is different for each user type.

The expectation from the Costume Help link – needs a bit more hand holding and perhaps they don’t know where to start or what they need.

The expectation from the search ad – is to browse 1950’s Grease costumes. They may know what they want since they are searching for a specific keyword and have an immediate need for a costume for a play that is next week.

The expectation from the email visitor – might be for more clarity on specific details of the garments, but each email may be a different case depending on the email content and context.

Each of those expectations have to be dealt with, either on the page or as 3 separate pages.
It’s easier to deal with them on separate pages because you can really focus on a single goal for the page and really target to your traffic and optimize or improve your sales and web conversions. My first recommendation is to create 3 pages to deal with each traffic source.

So let’s take a look at the page with these 3 types of users in mind. Depending on which channel a visitor is coming from upstream (search, email or help link) remember, the motivation and intent of the user will be different for each upstream point.

For this post we’ll only be examining one upstream point for the sake of simplicity and the highest impact on web conversion for HeyViv, which is the user type with the highest likelihood to buy, so let’s take a look at the AdWords search traffic, starting with the ad.
Below is the AdWords copy that is driving the most visitors to this landing page.

1950s Costumes & Vintage
Outfits for plays, parties & events
All sizes, quick ship, discounts
www.HeyViv.com

1950s Costumes & Vintage
Outfits for plays, parties & events
All sizes, quick ship, discounts
www.HeyViv.com

The landing page for these ads needs to address costumers who are looking for 1950’s outfits for a production, dance, event or play. They are there to shop because they need something and usually fast.

These visitors need more reassurance about outfits for specific plays, maybe full outfits for different characters in the play. In general there are too many options that get the visitor off track. The page needs to be designed to help this visitor group buy.

The first way this page can go about accomplishing that is by reinforcing the key points used in the ads like the words “1950s” “Outfits for plays” etc. by reusing those keywords prominently as headlines and sub headlines on the landing page your letting the visitor know the page they are on has what they are looking for. This subtle form of reassurance provides verbal ques to the visitor to help orientate them. Once a visitor clicks their anxiety level goes up. It’s like they have just been dropped off on an alien planet. Your landing page design needs to relieve this anxiety as immediately as possible so as to keep them from bouncing.

Once their anxiety level has calmed down a bit, knowing they are in the right place for what they need is the perfect time to present a strong value proposition and answer why they should buy from you over all the other options they have. This further reduces they disorientation and anxiety however you’re not done yet.

Next, you need to address some of their buying concerns upfront. Remember all you’ve done so far if you followed the advice so far is slightly reduce their anxiety level; you haven’t begun to sell to them yet. At this point they need to know you have the 1950’s clothing they need, is it right for what they need it for and how much does it cost. Currently the landing page does not list any prices, forcing the visitor to pogo-stick back and forth from this page to the product detail page and vise versa. By forcing them to click back and forth you’re not making it easy for them to buy.

Once product and price have been addressed on a newly redesigned landing page, the page still has even more work to do to make more sales. At this point your visitor has decided not to leave, at least not to leave just yet. You’ve gotten past the first 3 seconds, so it’s time to continue to reduce their anxiety and reassure them that buying form you is safe. You’re page design’s next step is to continue down the selling path by addressing concerns like – shipping policy, return policy, etc. Remember the visitor hasn’t decided they want to buy yet. Your design needs to accomplish all of these things on the landing page itself so as not to lead them off the buying path.

The key to increasing web conversions on your landing page is to put the visitors goals at the center of your design and help them buy from you. When you approach web conversion from the point of view of your visitors buying process you can clearly see what needs your visitors require and in what order you must satisfy them in order to increase your online conversion rate.

When it comes to persuasion, human nature is very predictable. There are certain conditions in which we all react similarly. When the right conditions are presented to us and the right persuasive buttons are pushed they act as automatic compliance mechanisms that, once set in motion are very difficult to resist, this is just the way our brains are wired.

In the classic book on persuasion, Influence: The Physiology of Persuasion, Dr. Cialdini, who is regarded as the world’s highest authority on persuasion and influence, masterfully examines six principles of persuasion that are universal across all cultures and circumstances. Among the six principals are the principle of scarcity and the principle of commitment.

Both of these persuasion principles as well as others can translate online in the form of persuasive design and conversion rate optimization. Let’s examine how Totsy.com expertly applies the principal of scarcity and at the same time solves the problem of choice as discussed in a previous post.

Totsy is an Ecommerce website that adds a level of exclusivity through private selling and requires you to create an account before you ever see a single product for sale, creating a form of exclusive access for savvy moms.

Exclusive access alone is in itself a form of persuasion, by wrapping membership around the language of exclusivity on the home page. The button copy used to become a member fully supports the exclusivity of the site. Rather than simply saying, “Join” the button, says “Request Membership” which is congruent with the private access they promise for brand specific sales of up to 70 percent off.

Once a Totsy member the principle of scarcity is in full effect. Totsy features products on it’s site for a limited time, up to three days and typically at 40 – 70 percent off.

You can only buy 3 items – and preview upcoming items for the next 9 days. The limited choice of only 3 items is actually a good thing and encourages members to become repeat visitors, creating a behavior pattern in their customers to remain in a constant bargain buying mode.

The perceived scarcity that is created by limiting sales to a specific time with a countdown clock generates more demand and taps into the limiting factor of scarcity for every item.

The time for the sale is very prominent on the detail page and throughout the browsing visit. What is more interesting is the use of the principal of consistency. The persuasion principal of consistency states that if people publicly take even a small stand towards something, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Totsy capitalizes on this principal masterfully by adding a timer to the shopping cart. After you have added a product to your cart an Attention message warns you that your cart will be emptied in 9 minutes if you don’t check out or resume activity on the site. This creates a form of persuasive pressure for the buyer. They have committed to adding an item to their cart and now the pressure to remain consistent with their action of adding an item to the cart begins to build over the next nine minutes.

The factor that has the most impact on weather a visitor to your website buys or bounces is their individual level of motivation. Everyone has their own individual motivations for finding their way to your landing page or website and there can be literally millions of different levels and types of motivation that get some one to click and buy. For a refresher read the post on the 21 reasons why people buy. An understanding of your visitors motivation is vital to improving your conversion rates, which is why I recommend starting with your customer by creating user persona documents before you begin to design or write any copy. Understanding the exact motivation or combination of motivations from your visitors’ perspective is where the mouse meets the click. But selling online is more complex than just matching motivations; we’re not really all a bunch of pavlovian dogs although we’re not far off. Different people prefer to buy in different ways and the key to better conversion rates is not a heavy-handed persuasion fist, it’s a combination of tools of which persuasiveness is only one.

The problem with most websites is that they start and stop with only one way to communicate to everyone. A mass media broadcast strategy in a one to one Internet world. That works on TV and in print but not on the Internet. On a website you can literally tap into the exact way your visitor prefers to buy rather than forcing everyone to buy the same way.

The key to tapping into this power is the humble little link. But before we get into that let’s first take a look at how to help different types of visitors buy. No matter what you sell online or who your potential buyers are, it all goes back to the human brain. Every human brain is wired the same way and therefore we all process information the same way. When in a buying or browsing mode, no matter what our individual motivations may be, we all fundamentally process information three basic ways. Visually, auditorally and kinesthetically. These are the different modalities of learning and processing information before we decide to buy.

Every individual usually prefers one of these modalities over the other. The visual modality person learns best by seeing. The visual cortex of the brain is larger than all of the other sensory cortexes of the brain put together. The auditorial modality person learns best by hearing. The kinesthetic modality person learns best by doing.

So how does this tie back into selling online, optimizing your conversion rate and the humble little link you ask? Well, remember that each modality is connected with the processing of information and processing of information is directly tied to how we choose and make purchases.

Visitors on your website move through the online space, from one page to another page by following text, images and links. Each modality is an indicator of how that particular person prefers to buy. Quite literally each modality is attracted to a mirror of itself. The visual person is attracted not only to images but to words that resonate with the visual. For example words like see, and look. The auditory person is more attracted to words that key in on the auditory senses like hear, listen. And the kinesthetic person is drawn to tactile words like feel.

These different modalities are keys to how each person prefers to be sold to. Remember websites don’t’ sell, they help people buy and if you can tap into how different types of people prefer to buy you can sell more online.

So let’s tie this back to the link now that you know what motivates the different types of modalities and what each prefers. You can apply this to increase your conversion rate by weaving in the different key trigger words for all three modality types into your sales copy and linking each to a different buying path, that is a different page and flow that is specifically designed to sell to that particular modality.

Because the prospects that visit your site don’t all fall into only one specific modality type you’ll need to apply your linking strategy to all three. By tapping into how each visitor’s brain is wired and allowing them to flow through your website at their own pace and through a path that they create for themselves through the links you’ve provided you’re helping them buy from you.

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.

For years Internet marketers have spent time on search engine optimization (SEO) which focuses on driving more free traffic to your website by improving the likelihood of people finding your website through an unpaid search result. In the early days of the web and even to some degree today, the mentality has been once you have web traffic the rest would take care of itself. Unfortunately this is not even close to being true. Very few marketers have spent any where near the time and devotion on conversion rate optimization (CRO) as they have on SEO, although the number of smart marketers concentrating on conversion is growing more and more.

Traffic is only one component of success, getting people to your site is necessary but if 98% (based on an average ecommerce conversion rate of 2%) of those people are just getting there and not buying or signing up or completing whatever your conversion goal you have for your website, you’re leaving money on the table. Money that could be yours, by improving your website conversion rate.

Conversion rate optimization is the process of scientifically changing elements of your website in an attempt to make your website more effective. These elements can include but are not limited to web pages, landing pages, images, words and processes used on your site, or simply taking away what does not work. Conversion rate optimization is powerful because it increases your website conversion rate without increasing the number of visitors to your site. By increasing total conversions you should increase overall revenue, depending on the specific definition of what your business considers a conversion. For example an ecommerce website would consider a conversion a sale, a lead generation website might consider a conversion as some one who has filled out a request for information form or downloaded a white paper, etc.

The practice of conversion rate optimization has evolved out of two main schools of thought. One school is focused on jumping straight into testing various elements and pages of your website to discover the best version that will increase conversion rates. The second school of thought is focused on first understanding your visitors thought process and then moving onto the testing phase.

Neither school of thought is better or worse than the other. Each has a place depending on the needs of the business. However, they both come down to scientifically testing and letting your customers choose what works best. There is no room for ego driven decisions when it comes to conversion optimization, it always comes down to your customers and consistently rigorously testing, over and over again. Any test is better than not testing at all.

For more information on how to optimize your website for higher conversion rates, please contact bobby @ creativethirst dot com.

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

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.

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.

Photo Credit: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction by Mykl Roventine. used under Creative Commons License.

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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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