As an Internet marketer you really have two options, widen the top of your online funnel or the bottom of it. If you widen the top of your funnel you’ll bring more people to your website which is great right? More people in the door translates to more people buying right?

But even at double the standard E-Commerce internet average conversion rate of 2% if you bring in twice the amount of people to your site you’ll get 2% of a bigger number, which is more people right? Well, you probably already know that it doesn’t exactly work this way. Eventually you would run out of money to feed the traffic machine and only get an incremental increase in conversions. Once you slowed down or stopped the wheel of traffic your overall conversions would eventually suffer.

What about the other 98% of people that didn’t convert? By widening the bottom of your funnel, your conversion rate increases. Optimizing for conversions provides you with a bigger part of that 98% without adding any more money to driving more traffic.

Let’s say your conversion rate is 2% so for every 5,000 people that visit your site 100 of them convert into buyers. If you increased your site traffic by only 0.5% your conversions would increase to 125 buyers increasing your total sales $10,00.00 vs. $12,500.00 with an additional 25 sales than the previous get more traffic example.

By increasing your conversion rate by only 0.5% your not spending your marketing budget on wasted traffic and the benefits of an optimized landing page is that it’s converting at a higher rate for every month not just the month where the optimization was done or a month with added spend in traffic. Your sales and return on investment will outlive the optimization work.

Have you ever wondered which image would motivate your users to take action? Would the image of the product peek the interest of your web visitors or would more visitors buy if they saw your product in it’s natural environment and in use by people just like them? Or is the offer really he most important thing? Or maybe it’s just the price? Realistically it’s a combination of all of these things and more, which is the basis of persuasive design.

Well you can stop wondering because Google has just released a new tool called the Website Optimizer which helps you improve the effectiveness of your website in getting a return on your investment, currently the Optimizer is still in the beta stage ( as of April 2007) but sign-ups are open. What the Optimizer allows internet marketers to do is test different versions of a landing page to determine what the most effective elements are or combination of elements. This allows design to be used strategically enabling your site to motivate your web users and achieve higher conversion rates.

Essentially the Optimizer is a free A/B Testing tool where you can set up different versions of a landing page. On each version you can test different headlines, images, and text to examine which page has a higher performance for your specific visitors.

Once data on all the different versions in your test have been gathered Google presents the results in the form of a combination report and a page section report. Each report provides different insight into how responsive your visitors are to the combination of tested elements on your site. With this knowledge you can learn two things. First, what elements work and which don’t work for your customers. This newfound knowledge can be leveraged on future marketing campaigns for all areas of your brand communications. Additionally, by learning how well a particular combination of design elements performed in a real world environment you can then easily develop a more successful landingpage and maximize your marketing results by determining what will best attract your unique users and lead them to convert on your site.

The sample combination report below shows the performance results for several combinations of test pages for content as a whole in comparison of the original control page design.

The sample page section report below in contrast focuses on which variations to each page section performed best.