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Top 7 Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites
On our “Ask the Experts” post, one reader asked how to go about optimizing a low-traffic website.
We get this question a lot.
Marketers — particularly small business owners and do-it-yourself-ers — want to know if optimization is worth it. They’re short on time and they’re dealing with limited resources. They can’t wait six months to fix something that’s broken now. They don’t have the luxury.
If you’ve realized optimization can’t wait, and you don’t have the budget to hire a firm, consider these…
Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites
1.) Get a testing platform — Any testing platform will do, but if your budget is tight, we recommend using Google Website Optimizer. It’s free to use and FutureNow has developed several free resources to help you get started.
2.) Stick to A/B split testing — For a low-traffic site, you’ll want to stay away from multivariate tests and stick to simpler A/B split testing. Multivariate testing involves optimizing more than one page element at a time, often with more than one variation per element on a given page. For example, you might be testing four different headlines, three different pictures, and two variations of your body copy on a given landing page. That means you’ve just created 24 (4×3x2) different page combinations for your test. Getting enough traffic to come up with a statistically valid results could take a low-traffic site an exceedingly long time to do that. Assuming you had 50 visits per day and a brilliantly high current conversion rate of 10%, that still means it would still take more than two thousand days (about 6 years!) to get any data worth looking at. Meanwhile, A/B testing only a few combinations can give you statistically valid data within a month or two. Again, low-traffic sites should stick to A/B testing. (This white paper can help you determine whether it’s too little or too early to A/B test.)
3.) Don’t make hasty conclusions — Be patient. Wait for the tests to fully complete before jumping to conclusions. Once they do complete, take a deep breath. On any given test page, the “Chance to Beat Original” and “Chance to Beat All” percentages are crucial — and potentially misleading if you’re not up on your statistics. Basically, anything less than 90% is simply a trend that might be reversed from one week to the next. We’ve actually seen these kind of reversals happen, where a positive change (with 70% chance to beat original) flipped negative from one week to the next. Think of it this way: If you randomly flip a coin, you could get 3-4 heads in a row over 4 flips and conclude that heads was the clear “winner” over tails. Not smart. Only after many, many flips is it safe to assume you have a clear winner (or a very weird coin).
4.) Know what you’re looking for — Make sure you know how to get a hypothesis worth testing. In other words, you should know ahead of time how to interpret the results. Don’t randomly test this image or that headline. Do so because you have reason to believe the headline “should” better appeal to buyers with a given buying motivation, or because the picture “should” resolve a particular concern. That way, you have a basis for interpreting the results. That doesn’t mean the results will be absolutely conclusive (it’s possible that people really do have your hypothesized motivation but your headline was merely a bad execution of the concept), but you’ll have a way to interpret the results and do further analysis if needed. Intelligent testing essential, especially when you don’t have much traffic.
5.) Test one click at a time* — Shorten the distance between the Experiment Page (where you’re running the test) and the Goal Page (where you count conversions). This will yield conclusive results in less time. A quick e-commerce example: Use the shopping cart as a Goal Page for a test being run on a Product Page (as opposed to using the Order Confirmation Page as the Goal Page).
6.) Ensure success with Pay-Per-Click* — Purchasing traffic to validate changes to your site is like buying insurance on the effectiveness of your web design. If your PPC ads are well targeted and attract more (and more qualified) visitors, your test results will be more accurate. With enough visitors, testing is like letting visitors design your site for you.
7.) Prioritize your optimization efforts — Optimizing for usability and conversion is usually easier than optimizing for persuasion. Before a site can persuade, its basic elements must work. Go for the low-hanging fruit, then work your way up the Hierarchy of Optimization.
Got questions on how to optimize your site? Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
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*Indicates a tip that has been added to the list.
[Editor's Note: Today is your last chance to register for the Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, happening tomorrow, Friday the 28th, in San Francisco.We're keeping class size small and there are only two or three tickets left, so hop to it!]
About the author
Jeff is a Persuasion Architect with FutureNow. He also teaches FutureNow's Persuasive Online Copywriting workshop.
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March 24th, 2008
4:02 pm
Great tips Jeff. I work on a lot of site that have low traffic. Usually they
were spending a lot of money on PPC and the CPA was just not worth it. I
recommend buying longer keyword phrases that are cheaper and bring in more
qualified traffic. Plus, targeting your landing pages to these phrases.
Also, don’t only focus on sales as your main goal. Set up conversion goals
for email collection and lead capture and plan a follow-on marketing
campaign. Then do small A/B tests on key areas of the site.
March 26th, 2008
1:14 pm
Good advice. I’d definitely second (3) & (4). Testing takes time on small sites, and you need to plan effectively and use that time wisely. I’ve also found that smaller sites tend to have an initial reaction period where loyal visitors balk at changes but later accept them (even positive changes). This can delay reliable results even further.
March 26th, 2008
2:05 pm
Great tips and interesting comments. In France, high traffic sites are discovering what is optimization. I think the revolution could come from small sites with clever marketers.
March 26th, 2008
3:26 pm
These are great. Oftentimes smaller businesses truly don’t know where to focus their efforts on – it always seems like one big mountain they can’t climb. These are great tips to begin!
March 27th, 2008
6:40 am
Jeff, thanks for answering my question in this post. I will have to now plan and do things as you mentioned in the post above. I hope this will improve conversion rate of website. Also comments by Alex above are quite interesting, I should also use those to improve conversion.
March 27th, 2008
7:23 am
Thank you Jeff for the contribution. I’ll try to implement your tips!
March 28th, 2008
5:12 pm
Regarding #5-”Test one click at a time”: Will the example of using the shopping cart as the Goal page provide valid results? I find that many visitors click on the “Add to cart”-button just to check how the Cart looks like, as a way of checking if the company of the site is trustworthy, but they don’t buy. So will these “conversions” show if a test creates more $$$? Anyone with a comment?
March 31st, 2008
12:33 pm
Hi Jeff, I have been following your resources and have taken a few online seminars, thank you. I tried to work with G.W.O. on my Blog and for some reason I didn’t get to place Google Codes around the titles, I must of been doing something wrong, I will try it again. Thanks for all the great information.
March 31st, 2008
12:43 pm
Another good entry. I especially like number 4. Too many clients want to make changes for the sake of making changes. I always try to convince them that we have to have a reason for the change. I’ll use this to help with my argument.
March 31st, 2008
4:38 pm
Hey Jeff,
Good info. I think you’re never too early to start testing. We’ve found that several small changes over time really add to the cumulative success of a site.
March 31st, 2008
8:17 pm
BP: #5 is very dangerous. I would put a huge warning around that one since it could cause you to think you are increasing conversions, when you really are not.
Here’s a fairly well known scenario: Amazon and other etailers hide prices of some products and force users to add it to cart because the price is too low to display on the page. They probably get a lot more clicks, since everyone wants to see the price, however it does not necessarily mean people follow through with the purchase more often.
There are many things that if you don’t put on your first page, but do put on your 2nd (like the legitimacy factors BP mentioned) that can cause many clicks, but few conversions. So I would always keep track of full conversions, while giving clicks some consideration if you are comfortable with the risk.
April 1st, 2008
10:08 am
Billy,
I agree with you that anyone optimizing a site’s sales process one step at a time, as mentioned in point 5, defintely needs to watch their metrics.
An extra degree of uncertainty is introduced into the testing process when a page other than the final goal page is used. However, the risk of this uncertainty is not as large as the lost opportunity cost of not testing due to low traffic.
Here is a relevant post about optimizing a sales funnel. The part about factors on earlier pages in the funnel effecting later pages is particularly important for testing a funnel one click at a time.
June 1st, 2008
5:51 am
Talking about different, my site is crap, but does ok.
I have big ticket items for sale (workshop machinery)
We neither need nor want a lot of hits, and need very local business only. (Machinery is heavy and expensive to ship)
Our google position is always good because we have some aspects of the market to ourselves.
My daughter has a very different ebook business, a great Joomla site but it needs heaps of a/b testing, as every tiny word seems to make a difference. It has taken a long time and a lot of work to get hits and sales
August 15th, 2008
11:08 am
I have another perspective of SEO for blogs. This article might be very helpful and interesting to read.
http://www.hurricanesoftwares……o-success/
I have written this article for the bloggers looking for SEO Success.
Hope it helps!
Cheers
October 22nd, 2008
9:10 am
[...] “ Top 7 tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites” de Future Now soulève une problématique intéressante qui est : Comment optimiser les [...]
November 12th, 2008
6:22 am
Hi guys..
I have got 5 websites and have struggled to get traffic. It has taken months to get the main one up and running but I have managed to go from zero visits a day to 2500 a day.(1500 uniques) It has all finally clicked in my head and now I am working on a sixth website.. This is a different story because I know how to get the traffic alot quicker.
There won’t be as much testing and trying to get the right keywords because I do have a clue now..
December 5th, 2008
6:52 am
[...] the areas where you’ll see greatest improvement. Not sure where to start? Check out the tips here, here and [...]
December 17th, 2008
7:56 am
I loved the bit about avoiding the trap of hasty decisions. That’s one the keys, isn’t it. Many people lose hope between the execution of campaigns and getting the results phase (which sometimes can drag for months naturally).
December 17th, 2008
10:25 am
[...] sure you know which page to A/B test. (For past tips, see GrokDotCom and past thinks coverage here and [...]
June 27th, 2009
7:53 am
Thank you Jeff for the contribution. I’ll try to implement your tips!
Good infos!
July 1st, 2009
1:22 pm
Great tips.Agree with you but PPC campaign should be carefully designed otherwise it will lead to total waste of time.