Archive for February, 2008
PayPal Should Go Undercover
PayPal recently announced a streamlining of its payment flow process that doesn’t require a PayPal account to use. In other words, you can “check out” via PayPal, reap the security benefits of the merchant store not knowing your financial details, and pay for your item without having created any long-term relationship with PayPal (although they wouldn’t mind).
Adding PayPal to an e-commerce site can sometimes result in lower conversions — which makes sense because you’re being taken away from the experience you were just having at the merchant site. On the upside, some mid-sized UK merchants using this new process are reporting an increase in their monthly total payment volume, with gains of over 9% on average.
But I’ve got a different request altogether.
I use PayPal. A lot. Probably at least $500 a month of online purchases of various things that, at the time, I’m convinced I really need. It always amazes me how confusing the PayPal part of the checkout process is. First I’m on the merchant site. Then I’m off it — but not so obviously that I notice right away. It’s just a white, empty-feeling page with the merchant logo and a familiar PayPal button. Then the interface changes again to make it obvious that it’s PayPal.
In order to return to the merchant site, I have to click a small-font text link that competes with PayPal-branded buttons for my attention. At this point, I’m still not sure if the purchase “took” — that confidence doesn’t come until I return to the merchant site.
Won’t some of those e-tailers enjoying that volume increase please, please, PLEASE put just a fraction of that revenue toward hiring a bright developer to create a way to do this undercover? Its seems this could be easily resolved with a bit of (*buzzword alert*) AJAX.
Enter your PayPal user name, maybe some kind of modal lightbox pop-up to asks for my password, it goes back behind the scenes to confirm this with PayPal, then seemlessly closes the pop-up and updates my status on the merchant site to say, “Purchase completed via PayPal. Thanks for your business!”
I like using PayPal. I just don’t want to notice it. Kinda like the electricity in my home; I just want it to be there when I plug in my laptop.
What do you think?
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Written by:John Quarto-vonTivadar
How to Prioritize Your Optimization
Everyone wants to optimize. If you’re like most companies, you have a laundry list of things you’d like to do with your site. You know instinctively that all the items on the list are of equal value. You know some might have more impact than others. You also know these items require different amounts of effort and resources. So the obvious question is, “Where do I begin?”
You’re likely familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which states that human beings must first prioritize basic needs, such as food and shelter, before they’re able to seek higher needs, like social interaction and self-actualization needs. What good is owning a Harley-Davidson or finding the perfect outfit for a trip to a club if you’re starving to death?
Looking at your site in a similar fashion is extremely helpful. Since I first introduced our concept of the hierarchy of optimization last year, I’ve wanted to dig into it a little deeper:
Taking a step back and examining the entire pyramid will help you better assess where to start or assist you in knowing exactly what you’re optimizing now. The hierarchy also gives insight into optimization’s potential impact.
Let’s start at the bottom. Remember, the higher you go on the pyramid, the bigger the impact you’ll make on optimization. Also remember that the pyramid doesn’t indicate the level of effort needed to optimize, because this is as different from site to site as we are different from each other.
The Hierarchy of Optimization
Function is almost below the basics. Does your site have long periods of downtime? Do you deliver hundreds or thousands of 404s? Does your shopping cart constantly freeze up on visitors? Can users log in? Do images load? Is your site heavy on customer-facing errors? As a first order of business, work to make your site as reliable as the sunrise.
Another aspect of function is making sure that back-end functions are also in place. We’ve worked with companies that were spending ample on marketing and great site widgets, but the back-end shipping process was broken, causing an embarrassing amount of orders to go unfulfilled. This isn’t sexy marketing; it’s Business 101. Why go through all the hard work to market and sell a $1,000 dress only to have the customer walk up to a dirty checkout lane with a broken cash register circa 1950?
Having solid, clean user data for analytics also falls in the function level, otherwise anything higher up on the pyramid can’t be optimized with any accuracy or confidence.
How accessible is your site? Remember the recent lawsuit brought against Target.com for not having alt tags on its images? Font size, language issues, and pages and sections that don’t load correctly are other accessibility issues. Browser-specific issues fall in this level as well. Check your access logs to determine if you’re under-serving or ignoring a visitor segment. Optimize for people with disabilities, allow fonts to be resizable for users who need larger print, and solve browser-specific issues. If you remember, 38 percent of the retailers had difficult-to-read fonts in our 2007 Customer Experience Study. Optimize for dial-up users (there are still plenty of them out there). Access for mobile devices should also be considered.
Are your buttons easy to find and see? Is the search dialog where users expect it? Do you use drop-downs when you could use a radio button? Usability is about moving site elements around and using size, color, and contrast to improve the ease of use of your site. Thousands of great articles have been written about usability. Jared Spool’s are my favorites.
Call-to-action button optimization is a popular optimization item for marketers. For most, the effort is low, and it can have significant impact. Still, it’s only one aspect of the usability equation.
While similar to and often confused with usability, the intuitive layer is about improving the flow of the visitor’s site experience and optimizing aspects that keep the visitors from buying. Point-of-action assurances, product detail pop-ups, customer reviews, upfront shipping costs, and current in-stock messaging all reduce friction in the buying process, anticipate customer questions, and offer answers at the point the customer asks.
On a lead generation site, optimize form questions, try to shorten the time needed to fill out the form, and introduce ways for the visitor to take more control of when and how they’re contacted.
At the top of the pyramid are site elements that move a customer toward making a decision to buy your specific product. Persuasion issues are almost always high impact.
Improving persuasion on your site is mostly done by improving copy or product images. Product descriptions, feature tours, demos, and product comparisons (even with competitors) are considered persuasive issues. On a lead gen or B2B (define) site, it’s your service description, case studies, testimonials, and white papers. Make sure your copy addresses each of your personas.
Brand image and a site’s overall look and feel are often persuasion issues, especially if there’s a disconnect between the brand promise and site design. But have no doubt that a strong familiar branded product will forgive a multitude of site errors, as many of us have endured horrible sites and process to buy products and services we really wanted.
Assuming the bottom three levels are sound on your site, persuasion scenario planning will assist in planning and measuring the intuitive and persuasion challenges you face.
Conclusion
Start at the pyramid’s bottom and list each of the optimization tests or changes you need to consider. For each item, rank the effort it will take your team to make the change or test possible. Start with low-effort items, even if they’re low on the pyramid. Then work your way up.
Best of luck with your optimization efforts this year. If you need help planning and prioritizing your tests, we’d be happy to oblige.
This originally appeared in my ClickZ column from 2/29/08.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
The 7th Deadly Claim — “Best Value”
“Best Value” can be a useful label, but it’s a lousy claim if you can’t back it up.
“Best value” makes a bold promise. It says to your website’s visitors, “I’ll prove to you that my product/service/whatever is worth far more than the asking price.” If you’re going to make this claim, you’d better have the proof waiting for them on the product- or service-description page.
Don’t be shy, though. If you can prove the “best value” claim, it’s a great way to simplify the customer’s selection process. High-speed decision-makers (Spontaneous and Competitive types) will likely read “best value” as your attempt at saving them time. For slower-paced customers (Methodical and Humanistic types), it helps kick-start their quest to find the very best value.
Whatever the visitors’ temperament, they’ll expect you to prove your claims, so before we talk about how to substantiate “best value” claims, let’s review the elements that evoke “value.”
As Roy Williams explains,
“The value of an item – in the mind of a consumer – is simply the difference between the anticipated price and the price on the tag. When the anticipated price is higher than the price tag, it’s a ‘good value.’”
A Bargain @ Any Price
“Best Value” should be supported in two steps:
1) A detailed description of the item — (build up the anticipated price)
2) The actual, lower-than-expected price — (surprise the visitor and entice them to buy)
Do BOTH parts well and you’ll be golden. Here’s how:
Since “value” is subjective, you’ll need to support it with an objective, factual statement. Don’t tell me your hot chocolate is a great value because it’s the “richest and most flavorful.” Tell me it contains 70% cocoa powder — twice as much as any other brand. Don’t tell me your pizza is the “cheesiest.” Tell me you use a full pound of genuine buffalo mozzarella flown in from Naples for every large pizza. You get the picture.
Then, after substantiating your product’s wonderful qualities, show me that the price isn’t much more than a typical hot chocolate, pizza, or whatever. Do those two things and people will be persuaded to click the Add-to-Cart button or fill out your lead form.
The Quality/Price Ratio
The problem for most companies is that they don’t do BOTH well: Either they don’t do enough to persuade customers of the product’s value, or they price their high-quality item even higher than what they’ve been able to substantiate to the market.
Most businesses don’t offer higher quality at slightly higher prices. They offer higher quality at proportionally higher prices, then try to sell it to us as “value.” But value is actually the ratio of (Perceived) Quality-to-Price. So, higher quality at a proportionally higher price doesn’t represent better value.
If I’m considering a cheap-o $10 knife and you offer me twice as much knife for $12, that’s a good value. If you offer me twice as much knife for $20, your $20 knife may not feel like a bargain.
The way out of this used to be to stress the intangibles of the product. Not long ago, the copywriter would build perceived value above and beyond the substantiated value by talking about, say, the fact that the knife was professional quality. That it was the same knife used by Charlie Trotter, Emeril Lagasse, or the like. The copywriter might wax poetic about the balance of the knife and its feel to the hand. He’d stress the added pleasures of using a more expensive knife over time. He’d hint at the increased social status that only brand-name cutlery can bring.
That used to work very well. But thanks to our depressed economy, our heads are hardening by the day, and those sorts of value-added extras no longer add as much value — not lately, anyway.
In this type of climate, you’ll have to prove that the value added by your product provides genuine Return on Investment — (show how jeans last 2x longer and, therefore, are worth 1.5 times as much) — or you’ll have to master yet another two-step process.
The Value Margin Two-Step
Now, before I get into that, I want to emphasize that I’m NOT preaching a discount or price-cutting mentality; on the contrary, I’m recommending you substantiate your product’s value and maintain your profit margins.
Only when your best efforts have failed should you consider Plan B:
1.) Increase the saleability of the product rather than its perceived value. In other words, allow your value-building efforts to increase the number of people who are willing to buy at a lower-than-usual price, rather than trying to use it to increase the price you charge.
2.) Decrease the buying pain enough to cause a favorable “anticipated vs. real” pricing structure. This could mean price-cutting, resizing portions, restructuring payments, reducing surcharges, etc.With any luck, doing both of these things will increase sale volume and keep you from having to lower your prices as much as you otherwise might. That’s probably not what you want to hear, and, as a copywriter, it’s not necessarily what I want to write, but it’s the truth. If you’re used to charging a high premium on intangibles there are going to be fewer people willing to pay the usual premium to get such things in the coming year.
Copy can’t fix everything. Each business must decide where to draw the line.
Show your value. Prove it. Convince hard-nosed customers. And if that stops working — or isn’t an option — go for Plan B.
In the meantime, read the other deadly claims at your own risk:
- “Superior Customer Service“
- “Easy to Use“
- “Most Experienced“
- “We’re #1“
- “100% Risk-Free“
- “Cutting Edge“
- “Best Value“
[Editor’s note: Want to improve the value of your website? Join us on March 28th in San Francisco for the first-ever West Coast edition of the Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, our popular Web writing crash course. Jeff Sexton and Holly Buchanan will be your instructors. Class size is limited so that attendees can get real advice and actually learn something.
As a bonus leap year discount, you’ll save an extra $100 if you register by 2/29.]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
“What Should I Test?” Free Google + Future Now Webinar
In the past few months, we’ve received emails and comments from people who want to know the secret. They’ve read a few posts on website optimization testing, but they’re disillusioned. Their tests haven’t been effective — meanwhile, Future Now keeps yammering about how…
“Lead generation went up 5,000%!” (Tumbleweed rolls.)
“They doubled their conversion rate!” (Crickets chirp in disbelief.)*
Don’t think you can do it? Bryan Eisenberg and Google’s Tom Leung disagree. Join them for a free webinar on March 11th.
*Please Note: Case studies not boring when about your site.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Webinar: Getting Results with Google Website Optimizer
Who: Google Website Optimizer’s Product Manager, Tom Leung, and Future Now co-founder Bryan Eisenberg.
What: Want to improve your website’s performance? Interested in learning how to get the most out of Google’s free A/B and multivariate testing tool, Website Optimizer? This one’s for you.
In previous webinars (”Introduction to Website Optimizer” and “Creating and Launching Experiments“), the Google Analytics and Google AdWords teams have shown how to use the tool. But this time around, they’ll be delving into a more fundamental question: “What should I test?”
In recent articles, we’ve shown how testing can transform your site over time. Yet it doesn’t do much good just to know you should test. Without a clear hypothesis, it’s easy to lose track of your own guesswork. Knowing how to test a hypothesis is critical. So, by popular demand after many Website Optimizer users asked for more insight on what exactly they should test, Google has invited us — and all of you — to join them for this free tutorial.
During this online seminar, Tom and Bryan will:
- provide a brief introduction to Website Optimizer for newer users
- talk about testing best practices
- discuss some of the top elements to test on any webpage, and
- review top mistakes people make when developing new content to test.
Where: Your computer
When: Tuesday, March 11th | 9 - 10 am PST | 12 pm EST | 4 pm GMT
Why: Because you’ve reviewed Future Now’s 7 free resources to get you started with Website Optimizer, and, sure enough, you’re ready to get started — almost.
Is this something you can do on your own, or should you hire a website optimization firm? That all depends on the time and resources you’re willing to put into it. But before you dive in with both feet, it’s smart to know what’s worth testing.
Register for Free! Upon registration, Google invites you to submit specific topics you’d like Tom and Bryan to cover.
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Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart
Approximately 76 million people have purchased from Amazon.com.
Chances are, many of you click this “Add to Shopping Cart” button several times throughout the year.
So, why does it always stump audiences of online marketers when I ask them where in the checkout process Amazon has us select a quantity for the item(s) we’re adding-to-cart?
Before you scroll down for the answer, let me give you some popular Add-to-Cart methods to choose from:
#1 — A form field that defaults to “1″ or “0″
#2 — A blank form field to enter the quantity desired
#3 — A drop-down menu (usually from 1 to 9) to select quantity
#4 — A plain Add-to-Cart button that adds a single item to the cart (where you can adjust later)
Did you guess which one yet? Feel good about your choice? Hold that thought.
Amazon’s Add-to-Cart Evolution
I’ll let you know the answer in a moment, and don’t feel bad if you guessed incorrectly. It’s only been a few months since Amazon last changed its checkout process. But that’s not why you haven’t noticed what’s changed. The reason you’re unsure of how Amazon has you Add-to-Cart is because that’s exactly what they’re counting on.
Amazon doesn’t want customers to notice when they’re making changes like these.
Why? Because, for better or for worse, something as simple as an “Add to Cart” button can have a huge impact on the business. Amazon knows this, and they’ve built a culture of website optimization. It’s this foundation that’s made them one of the top-converting websites, month after month.
For Amazon, success comes from a continuous cycle of optimization (measure, refine, test). Compare this rigorous approach to the fact that over 75% of online retailers don’t do any optimization testing, and you’ll begin to see why Amazon remains the envy of e-commerce marketers.
I’ve been snagging images of Amazon’s Ready-to-Buy area (on their product pages) for many years. Let’s look at the evolution of this critical first stage of the checkout process to see what you can learn from it.
PLEASE NOTE: Just because Amazon does it, doesn’t mean you should. They make decisions based on their business needs, not yours.
Point-of-Action Assurances
Here’s an early version of Amazon’s ready-to-buy area:
Their Add-to-Cart button was one of the first to use an irregular shape; a circle with a cart icon on the left, blued to a rectangular button with the “Add to Shopping Cart” message. Notice how many point-of-action assurances there are (”you can always remove it later” on the button, and the lock icon with “Shopping with us is safe. Guaranteed.” right below).
These were the early days of e-commerce, when customers feared that the Earth might implode if they hit the wrong button. Back then, few people felt comfortable putting their credits cards online and Amazon, for the most part, sold books.
The objective: Make people comfortable clicking on the Add-to-Cart button.
“Buy now with 1-Click”
Notice how the wording at the top goes from “Buy from Amazon.com” to the more productive “Ready to Buy?”…
While the Add-to-Cart button stayed the same, with this incarnation, Amazon launched its “1-Click” feature and added it to the “Ready to Buy” area. This design expanded the renamed “Ready to Buy” area to 262 pixels tall.
The objective: Make sure everyone sees the bordered, stand-alone “Ready to Buy” area with the Add-to-Cart and 1-click buttons.
Note how the secondary action (”Add to Wish List”) is roughly the same color as the Add-to-Cart button. That will change.
Removing “you can always remove it later” + Button Shrink
I managed to snag this one while Amazon was running a split test…
Amazon decided to test removing “you can always remove it later” from on the Add-to-Cart button. They replaced it with a similar message (”you can always cancel later”), just below the “Ready to Buy?” header. What’s important here is that the buttons were now condensed, so this cluster of calls to action took up less space.
I think the little notches by the word “or” is a nice touch, don’t you?
The funny thing that happened when Amazon made these changes was that many of our clients at the time decided they should also remove point-of-action assurance from their Add-to-Cart buttons. We told them it would hurt their conversion if they changed it — and, sure enough, against our advice, the clients changed it and conversion dropped. Yet Amazon kept the new buttons. So the question remains…
Why would they switch to buttons that don’t convert as well?
Because conversion isn’t the only metric that matters. If you look closely, you’ll notice they made the “Ready to Buy” area take up about half the space of the previous version. Why? Because they quietly launched a marketplace to resell used goods, deciding it would boost profits if they didn’t have to stock and ship everything themselves — a fundamental shift in their business model.
The objective: Increase profits by showing used books higher up on the page.
(Don’t copy what other people do if you aren’t fully aware of the business issues involved.)
Amazon 2.0
Here we can see that Amazon has gone through a major redesign, and their iconic Add-to-Cart button gets a face-lift:
Notice that it’s the same shape, same colors, but now has a 3D effect. The “Ready to Buy” verbiage is no longer there, and the secondary “Buy with 1-Click” button now requires users to log in if they’re to see it. Also, the used book marketplace gets much more screen real estate. They’re also heavily promoting the A9 Search Engine.
Did you see that they changed the color of the “Add to Wish List” buttons so that only the Add-to-Cart button is the main focus of the page? They’ve even added another secondary action (”Add to Wedding Registry”).
Here’s what it looks like today…
They’re no longer promoting the A9 search engine, the marketplace isn’t taking up as much room, and they’ve added a few more secondary actions (”Add to Shopping List,” “Add to Baby Registry,” and “Tell a Friend”).
As you can see, they’ve added a pull-down menu to adjust quantity, so you don’t have to wait until checkout to change it. So, if you guessed option #3 at the beginning, congratulations, you’re my kind of e-commerce geek. 
The objective: Increase Average Order Value by keeping customers engaged in the buying process. This should also lower shopping cart abandonment by reducing the number of steps in the checkout process.
Big Money. Small Change.
Changing your call to action buttons doesn’t guarantee the highest return on investment from website, but it is an easy and popular test.
Amazon has spent many years testing this area, but they’ve tested countless other variables as well. They’ve tested the size and viewing functionality of product images, putting images on the left vs. the right side, the location of product reviews — you name it, they’ve tested it. Still, they continue to optimize this area (formerly known as “Ready to Buy”), making adjustments based on business cycle and market circumstance.
Amazon Wasn’t Built in a Day
Think your website is beyond repair? Tell it to Jeff Bezos. Once upon a time, his website looked like this:
Soon enough, after significant trial, error, and observation, he turned it into this:
Yes, it’s still ugly, but what Bezos realized early on is that, to be a successful online merchant, you need to get a hypothesis and test it if you want something that works.
Are you this dedicated to website optimization?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
70% of Online Shoppers Read Multiple Product Reviews
An e-tailing group study commissioned by PowerReviews has further revealed the necessity for customer-generated product reviews on e-commerce sites.
It seems the majority of online shoppers want to hear what people like them have to say about the product they’re researching. Almost 70% of customers looked at more than 4 reviews before making a purchase.
The study also gives a sense of how long visitors spend reading reviews before their purchase (50% spend over 10 minutes) and found that most people read reviews once they’ve narrowed down their search to 2 or 3 products.
Just having reviews isn’t going to cut it, though. E-tailers must give the would-be customer something more if they want them to come back to their sites — not just to research, but to buy. If more than 50% of customers spend over ten minutes looking at reviews, that shows they’re looking for more than just an overall “star rating.” For instance, one way of boosting your reviews’ credibility is having a “pros and a cons” field for visitors to fill out. This will show visitors that you welcome criticism and are confident in your products, while making the reviews that much more valuable to other visitors.
Here are some tips and a screencast from Bryan to help plan and optimize your review system.
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
WIRED Sees a Future in “The ROI of Free”
Chris Anderson, editor in-chief of Wired and author of the bestselling book-turned-Web 2.0-buzz-phrase, The Long Tail, launched a juicy cover story today.
In “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business” — which, as one might expect, is available for free at Wired.com* — Anderson argues that, across industries, businesses are baiting new customers with free stuff.
Of course, that’s nothing revolutionary. But it is evolutionary in the sense that we’ve come to expect some level of “free” something. In fact, we’re willing to pay top dollar for “free”! (Here’s how Ryanair does it.)
Back in 2002, Bryan evangelized “The ROI of Free“…
“An innocuous question can hit you where you live. I should have expected one day someone would ask me, “How do you measure your ROI for that?”
How does someone who writes “ROI Marketing” justify publishing so much content for free? Do we charge for advertising, rent our list, or bombard those names with commercial offers? No. In fact, Jeffrey, my brother and partner who handles such things, estimates we’ve invested about $100,000 developing free content for our newsletter, free whitepapers and other publications. How do we measure its ROI?
As our CFO will tell you, that $100k figure is nothing compared to what we’ve spent since “The ROI of Free” was published. Still, our dedication to free content remains — and for good reason.
Much like he did with The Long Tail (which also began as an article), this latest piece is Anderson’s way of cleverly cross-promoting-in-advance his upcoming book, FREE, which won’t be available in 2009. Looks like Anderson’s on his way to generating some positive word-of-mouth for the magazine and the book.
Has your business discovered the ROI of Free?
*Putting their money where your mouth is, WIRED will send you the print edition of its March 2008 issue for free — so long as you’ll offer a name and mailing address in exchange. 
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis
NINE OUT OF TEN PEOPLE WOULD RATHER NOT READ THIS SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS.
That may or may not be true. At the moment, this statement is merely a guess, an assumption — but it’s testable. It’s a hypothesis.
People love to insist that your website is made of magical ones and zeros. “It’s HTML,” they’ll say. “It lives on triple-redundant co-located servers,” they’ll argue. Yet the truth is much simpler, and scarier, than that.
Your website is a tower of assumptions. Everyone’s is. Perhaps yours was built according to a specific blueprint. Maybe it was built from a template. Either way, if it’s not properly maintained, the structure will collapse. But before you demolish the current structure and start over from the ground up, you should test the existing site.
If you want to improve your website, testing provides the scaffolding to fix it. And just as you wouldn’t hire a renovation crew that uses scaffolding made of toothpicks, your optimization tests require strong hypotheses. Of course, you can always test a bunch of random variables and see which configuration works best with your visitors, but that generally takes too long, adds noise to the data, and makes it difficult to gain any real insight.
The better thing to do is to start with a hypothesis.
Dropping Science
In my last post, I showed how testing allows you to optimize by letting visitors design your site for you. By giving them new versions of navigation and content elements and closely monitoring to see which ones work best, your visitors can vote with their clicks, and you can more easily adjust your site to fit their needs.
Be careful, though. If you don’t have a solid hypothesis, improvements can take longer — and be more incremental — than they should be. Recycling random variations of a page just to see what works often yields a much smaller return on investment than hiring a website optimization firm.
It’s the most common problem we see among companies that don’t outsource their testing: They don’t really know what to test.
Regardless of who tests your website, the scientific method [define] must drive the process. Your venture into testing must begin with curiosity. Curiosity is fundamental to humanity, and the basis for our achievements. To have success online, you must be curious as to why things happen and what is influencing them.
• Observation: “Why do so few people add an item to their cart from the product page?”
• Observation: “Why do my blog posts with short titles seem to get more comments?”
Curiosity is the initial spark to start a learning experience, but ideas and explanations must be conjured to satisfy that curiosity. This is where the hypothesis comes from.
Don’t Believe the Hypothesis
Again, a hypothesis is just an assumption. The ideas and explanations you base this assumption on can come from real world examples or basic intuition. To write a hypothesis, simply take the action you’re considering and state the result — a benefit, we hope — that you expect it to have.
• Hypothesis: “Making the ‘add to cart’ button larger will increase our conversion rate.”
• Hypothesis: “Using blog post titles with six words or less will increase the amount of comments.”
The one and only purpose of running a website optimization test is to prove (or disprove) your hypothesis by exposing it to real world conditions. As such, you’ll need to create variations of the elements you wish to test in a way that properly reflects your hypothesis, so you can test them against the original version to see which one works best.
Let’s start with “Making the add to cart buttons larger will increase our conversion rate.” To test this hypothesis, you’ll need to create a version of the page with a larger add to cart button. To be sure, you may also want to test more than one size. If a large button isn’t ideal, maybe a medium-sized one is.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat… TEST
Lets say the test proves our hypothesis to be valid and you decide to make the “add to cart” button larger. Wonderful, but you might want to hold off on the champagne.
Now it’s time to create another hypothesis about the best color for the “add to cart” button. For instance, “A green ‘add to cart’ button will yield a higher conversion rate than similar red or blue buttons.”
The point is to learn something — anything — about what is and isn’t working on your site. Approach testing in a systematic way and record what you learn to guide you through future tests. You may also want to revisit certain tests to see if they still hold true, especially if you’ve changed other elements on the page.
It’s very important not to get discouraged. Even if your hypothesis is disproved, you’ve learned something valuable; that what you have is working well enough for you to focus on another area of your site that needs attention.
On the other hand, if your hypothesis is strong — and the test results prove it — you’ve begun remodeling your “tower built on assumptions” into a high-rise casino, where the odds are stacked neatly in your favor.
. . .
[Editor’s Note: Blinded by science? Need a renovation? Future Now can help you test it.]
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
A New Contender for Best 404 Error Message
As any multi-tasker/easily-distracted-person knows, this happens all the time. We click on an a link sent via email, a few scrap letters get cut off the end, and OUCH… 404 error.
It really frosts my monocle.
Last year, Smashing Magazine offered plenty of example fodder for how to flip the 404 pancake. Those ones were great, but now I’ve got a new personal favorite.
Although it may not be the talk of the town just yet, The New Yorker’s error message ought to be. Notice how they stay on-brand while keeping you engaged with the site:
(Click to see how they keep you from hitting the ‘back’ button.)
Observations
- The cartoon supports their brand.
- They link to fresh content.
- There’s in-site search.
- Full top navigation.
- There’s even a podcast.
- It’s memorable.
- It should lower bounce rate.
Note to Smarty-Pants Readers: Yes, we realize our 404 message isn’t as cool as this — yet. At the moment, it takes you to our archives page. Feel free to cast the first stone in the comments
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Written by:Robert Gorell
