One of my favourite blogs has to be Google’s conversion room blog, as this gives you a host off helpful hints, tips and case studies on how to improve conversions on your website.
More traffic does not necessarily mean more sales. If your website is not optimised for conversions, then a lot of this traffic will just simply go to waste. I wrote an article on Sitepro News last year going into more detail on the subject of how SEO can bring you traffic, but that it’s up to your website to make the sale. It’s called SEO can lead a Horse to Water but you Can’t Make it Drink
By doing A/B and multivariate testing, you can optimise your website for conversions and maximise ROI. This is like letting your customers design your website.
An excellent free tool to conduct these invaluable tests is Google’s website optimizer. This is a very easy tool to get started with; you just need to set up what you want to test and insert some tracking code into the relevant web pages and you’re ready to go.
The blog post entitled 7 ways to improve your call to action goes into great detail on how to improve your landing pages. If you use PPC then you really need to read this post as it’s sure to give you some great ideas to help increase your conversions. I would note though, and it’s mentioned in the post, not to just blindly change your landing pages without testing first. A good idea is to only change one small aspect of your landing pages at a time, and using Google’s website optimizer, track the results of your test. Please note there is no such thing as a failed test, as you will always learn something from cunducting the experiment. If you are familiar will optimising your PPC ads for best click through rates, then you will be familiar with this concept.
The common mistake that people make is trying to give their potential customers too much choice on the landing page. We all like choice but giving the visitor too much can lead to confusion. For example a supermarket who had 20 different flavours of jams on sales noticed when the reduced the choice to just 6 flavours they sold a much higher volume of jam.
The 7 ways to improve your call to action, covers topics such as:
- Large call to action buttons
- Supporting your call to action
- What’s in it for the visitor
- Reducing the number of choices
- How to deal with competing offers
- Repeating your call to action
- Creating a call to action on your category pages
The post also mentions a very interesting video by Barry Schwartz called “The paradox of choice” which you can watch below.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM[/youtube]
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Evolution is an
IntelligentMVT
21 May, 2010
The list of seven steps is a great start, however I would also advocate looking in depth at analytics (either google or site-side) before embarking on any MV Testing. Testing is capable of producing great results, but the analysis beforehand really tell you where you should be testing.
Total Comment by IntelligentMVT: 1
Kevin
21 May, 2010
Hi Intelligent MVT,
(if that’s even your real name). I would totally agree, its important to know that you need to test, but what’s more important is knowing what to test that’s going to have a positive effect on your conversions.