A/B Testing
How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization
I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.
Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.
Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.
Get the Math Right
When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:
- 100,000 people visit your Web site
- 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
- Your site gets 3,000 total conversions
What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?
- 3,030
- 4,000
Translate All Numbers Into Dollars
Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).
Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).
It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.
Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.
Leverage Your Reach
Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.
With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:
In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.
Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.
This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.
With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:
- Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
- Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.
Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.
Is There a Catch?
While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.
The Bottom Line
You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?
Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?
*Article cross-posted on ClickZ
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Editor’s Note: Want an even easier way to get buy-in for conversion optimization? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar. Today (May 9th) is the last day to take advantage of the early registration discount for the Call to Action and Persuasive Online Copywriting seminars, so hurry up and make your business case for the trip. It’s a lot easier to convince management when you can save up to $300 off the price of admission.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Big Impact, Small Changes on Amazon
You probably didn’t notice, but Amazon just made it easier to quickly glance at the product you want and get all the information you need in order to buy.
All it took was few simple changes to the text on their product pages. By adjusting the size, color and font of the text and removing unnecessary words, they’ve cleaned up the product pages and made them easier to scan and skim.
Here’s what’s new:
• Font & Word Choice — Larger, color headline. Selective bolding. Price is larger. Less verbiage.
• Up-sell Area — Now shows product image. Cleaner headline matches product page headline.
Before…
This is how Amazon’s product descriptions used to look. As you can see, there’s not much differentiation in the text. Although there’s a lot of important stuff to read, it’s all in bold — which basically makes bolding meaningless (think “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”).
After…
Product Name, Price and Availability are things that all visitors want to see when they’re on a product page. With these changes, Amazon has further highlighted what’s essential — as they did by changing the size and color of the headlines — or cut the fat — as they did by editing out unnecessary words and turning bold into light gray. After all, should we be looking at the word “Price” or at the actual price?
Exactly.
So, how does Amazon know which changes will make their website more easy to use and therefore convert better? It’s not because they’re any smarter than you or your CMO (although we’re sure Amazon has some very smart people). It’s because they’ve built “a culture of website optimization.”
If you want to test strategically (like Amazon), we can help.
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Written by:Daniel McGuigan
Google Website Optimizer Webinar: What Should I Test?
In case you missed the live webinar or had technical difficulties while watching it last week, you can watch it on YouTube now.
The presentation is 63 minutes, and the sound on the YouTube version isn’t the best. If you prefer, you can watch it full-screen and with better sound via WebEx.
The webinar starts with an introduction to Website Optimizer by Google’s Tom Leung. Then I share some of what we have learned at FutureNow over the the past decade of optimizing websites, in order to show some of the most important things you should test. We then go into Q & A, but since there were additional questions that weren’t answered on the call, we will gladly answer them for you in the comments below.
As always, if you need help figuring out the specifics of what to test on your site, we can help.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
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!]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Using Funnel Reports to Boost Conversion
Funnel Reports are a good way to gain traction while competitors spin their wheels in muddy data.
Most web analytics programs give you the option to run a funnel report; a powerful tool, particularly for e-commerce sites, that shows where people are exiting the site’s sales process.
By analyzing the exit rate data in a funnel report, you can focus on optimizing the pages that need it most. First, look for areas with high exit rates. Then, once you have test pages selected, target specific elements to find improvements.
Ideally, your tests will boost conversion. But what if they fail?
If at first you don’t succeed, test, test again…
Here’s an analogy: If a visitor moves through your house (page-to-page) and reaches a locked door (a conversion barrier) for which they don’t have a key, they have no choice but to exit. You can test making changes to the door, but if you haven’t given them the key, your exit rate will remain high.
What’s the key? Confidence. If you haven’t given the visitor the information they need, you haven’t given them the confidence to move forward with the transaction. When the exit rate is high for a given page or step, chances are that you haven’t told the visitor something they were hoping to find out earlier in the buying process. So, it looks like they’re taking a step forward only to take a step back, when really they just didn’t have enough information to feel comfortable moving forward.
Elastic Path Software shows some examples of how funnel reports can be used effectively. Here are two more:
- The funnel report shows that the payment page, which follows a “Shipping Information” step in the checkout process, has a high exit rate. We test showing the visitor when they’ll receive the product before they hit the payment page. This lowers the exit rate for the payment page and boosts conversion.
- A funnel report shows that the shopping cart page has a high exit rate. We look at the previous step and find the product page isn’t telling customers whether their item is out of stock. Since visitors have to “add to cart” to get this information, we now have reason to believe that showing items as “in stock” or “out of stock” on the product page will lower exit rate, so we test it.
Since each site has its own unique characteristics, it’s best to think of our web analytics reports in terms of how they can help us empathize with visitors. What’s holding them back from converting? A funnel report can help you create a hypothesis and test to see what your visitors prefer. That’s how to optimize.Remember, it’s important to look beyond the page with the high exit rate. See what’s happening in previous steps. And if you’re still stumped, get an outside-the-funnel perspective.
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
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
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
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
When a Banner Ad Becomes a One-Click Stand
Holidays are a great time to advertise. Because of the emotional context, marketers know people will be especially attracted to holiday-themed ads. Valentine’s Day is no exception: You can almost set your clock to the sudden rush of banners strewn with cheesy hearts, bears and candy kisses.
Banner ads, once clicked, usually evoke the confusion of Alice’s rabbit hole more than the come-what-may optimism of Forrest’s box of chocolates — either way, you don’t know what to expect.
Grabbing attention is tough, and most of us are jaded from past letdowns. So, to work, a banner campaign must direct traffic, showing visitors what they’ll get and why they’ll want it.
Who You Lookin’ At?
One way to get attention is by showing models. TracFone is an example of a company that puts on a human face (albeit a scowling one). Let’s take a look at one of their banners to see how they might improve conversion…
The Valentine’s Day motif grabs attention, as do the girls’ faces, which seem to be looking straight at you. But eye-tracking studies show that we’re drawn to models’ eyes. We end up mesmerized, ignoring the critical parts of the ad.
The folks at TracFone should read Bryan’s post, “How a Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away.”
Since our attention stays on the faces and eyes, TracFone’s benefits are lost in the background. The all-caps name “XOXOFONE” frames the faces, further keeping the eyes on the upper left-hand side. A simple change in the direction of the eyes to the lower-right side of the ad would direct visitors to the call to action and company logo. (Besides, it might make these girls look like they’re not going to yell at the first guy who invites them to Prom via TracFone.)
Oh, No They Di’int…
From the banner ad, visitors are sent to this busy landing page:
Tracfone presents big, bright red hearts as a marker to connect the visitor. Yet they fail to build persuasive momentum. At this critical stage, the visitor isn’t brought deeper into the buying process. Instead of continuing the scent trail [define] of information, TracFone introduces new information and visuals that create a disconnect with the banner ad it was designed to support.
If TracFone were a Future Now client, here are a few things we’d have them test:
1. Don’t Look at Me! — When using models, make sure the eyes aren’t the focal point. Use an image that directs the visitors’ eyes toward the call to action. Let the copy drive the click.
2. Buy When? — Don’t propose marriage on the first date. There’s almost never enough info on a banner ad to convince someone they should actually “buy now.” Try flirting instead.
3. Consistency is Key — Build on the information and images on the landing page. Help would-be customers make the connection. People will quickly lose momentum to move forward if you present different prices, copy and images than they saw in the ad.
[Editor’s Note: Tired of one-click stands? Sick of hiring gold-diggers who don’t return the investment? Bring home a conversion analysis your CFO would approve of.]
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Written by:Peter Lee
Let Visitors Design Your Site for You
You’ll never build a site that’s as good as the one your visitors can build for themselves.
Even people with no sense of aesthetics are brilliant designers. It’s true.
How do you turn every visitor into a Web designer without training them, paying them, or even letting them know what you’re up to? (It’s not as bad as it sounds. Really.)
By conducting A/B and multivariate tests, you empower customers to collectively decide what works best for them. Supply them with different variations on your site and run the tests and they will tell you how they want your site to look and behave through their actions — which, as the cliché goes, speak louder than words.
Should you just test random changes in headlines, calls to action, and navigation? No way. Start fresh with a new hypothesis.
Test it.
Now that the Web is truly interactive, it’s all about the customer’s voice. That’s why it’s an absolute must to test your site; because without doing so, you’re forcing an environment upon your visitors without bothering to adjust to their needs. And that attitude is truly a thing of the past.
Are professional web designers still important? Of course! But design choices are merely assumptions, and they’re often no better than your own. A web design exists to enable and entice visitor actions — and that’s worth optimizing for.
What works best for your customers works best for you. When you test, everyone wins. Even if you get a bad result, you still win; you’ve confirmed that what you have is working better than the new assumptions you’ve made in the alternate variation. So, not only is testing far cheaper than doing an entire redesign, it’s often more effective to roll out a redesign by testing new sections and bits of content individually, rather than just dropping it on customers all at once. (Amozon just launched a redesign this way. Did you notice?)
Wrong assumptions will be made. No big deal. Get a new hypothesis. Test it.
Your visitors are trying to give you valuable information, but unless you’re testing, they have no voice.
In a recent study, 76.7% of online retailers said they don’t test. Are you?
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[Image credit: T.H.E. Journal.]
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
