Website conversion testing: a short introduction [case study] – Part 1 of 2

This is part 1 of a 2 part post where we’ll share how to do website conversion testing, and how the exact process we share below generated a whopping 126% more conversions for a hair restoration company in only 7 days. Everything else remaining equal, this increase represents over £2 million of incremental annual sales for this company. You won’t want to miss this and the next post!

Stop the guesswork in website design - instead: Always Be Testing!

What’s the best website design? What’s the best way to lay out a landing page? Which image should I use on my home page? Which headline works best? What’s the best way to word my offer? What font should I use and how big should it be?

These questions may seem somewhat unrelated; but they can all be answered by one, often underused, tool that EVERY internet marketer should be using today: website conversion testing.

The answer to every question above is “the one that converts more visitors into your goal“; whether that goal is a call, a form submission, or anything else, is up to you.

Wonderfully, the answer to the question is definitively within your grasp, and it’s called website conversion testing.

Simply, the purpose of website conversion testing is to make better use of the traffic you already have.

For example, let’s say that your search engine optimisation and your paid search campaigns generate 100 visitors to your website. If you can increase your website conversion rate from 1% (1/100 visitors call you) to 2% (2/100 visitors call you), this means you are doubling the amount of enquiries you receive from your website. Everything else being equal, this can effectively double your business.

Given the above example alone, you need to be looking at conversion rate testing very seriously.

What can you test in website conversion testing?

Nearly everything. We like to test big things – because they really make a difference to your results and because test results come in faster when traffic levels are high – things like:

  • your Home Page
  • your Contact us Page
  • your Landing Pages (that your Paid Search ads direct visitors to)
  • your calls to action
  • your headlines
  • your header images
  • the alignment and backgrounds of your pages
  • videos and images that sit “above the fold”
  • the common page elements in your sidebars
  • your navigation labels and their organisation
  • the colours of your buttons
  • the content of your offers

How to conduct a website conversion test

Website conversion testing is not difficult to do. But, it does require a disciplined process. Here is a summary of the process we use:

  1. Create a hypothesis – a hypothesis is basically an educated guess about something that may happen if you change something else. For example: “If I change the colour of this button from green to red, I will get 50% more people clicking the button”. You might guess that this stage of the testing process can be the most important, and you’d be right. We’d be happy to help you with this or website conversion testing in general.
  2. Choose the elements you want to test – if you want to test one thing against another (using a hypothesis like the one stated above), this is called a split, or an A/B test. You are testing variation A against variation B. This is the most common form of test. If however, you want to test more than 2 variables on a page at the same time, you can conduct a multivariate test instead.
  3. Choose the goal – in the example above, the goal is to get people to click the button. This action needs to lead somewhere, and this page is called your “conversion page”. It usually takes the form of a “thank you” page following a successful form submission.
  4. Design the variations – now you’ll need to design the two or more versions of the pages you want to test – this is easy for you to do if we created your website design, but it may require the help of your web designer if your website does not have a content management system
  5. Set up the test – we mainly use Google’s Website Optimizer for nearly all the tests we conduct. We like it because it’s easy to set up and it’s free to use. There is a need to collect a few codes and install them on your variation website pages, which again, is easy to do if we design your website using a content management system. Alternatively, you may need to ask your website designer to add the codes for you.
  6. Run the test – when your variation pages and your conversion page are ready, your ready to test the variation against the original. You should have a good idea of how long your test will require (we can help you figure this out). When you run the test, Google Website Optimizer will randomly serve up the original and the variation page, so you can truly test which one works better. If you like, 50% of your visitors will see your original, and the other 50% will see your variation. Running a randomised test (instead of sequentially) really helps to strip out anomalies such as seasonality or other marketing factors that may affect the test results.
  7. Increase your conversion rate – When the test is over (when a high confidence winner is determined) you are then able to choose the winner to stick with – enjoying the higher conversion rate as a result. And if the original is the winner, that’s fine! At least you’re not making changes to your website design blindly.
In the end, Google Website Optimizer will present you with results that look like this:

In this example, the variation contact form proved to be considerably more successful than the original contact form. (Click to enlarge)

It’s important to note that website conversion testing is an iterative process. In other words, once you run the process above, you’ll want to choose another variation to test and run the process again and again and again. You can probably imagine that if you do this time and time again, you have a very good chance of increasing your conversion rate with every iteration. Therefore, you must ALWAYS BE TESTING.
Next, we’ll share a case study of how we used website conversion testing, the exact process we shared above, and generated a whopping 126% more conversions for a hair restoration company in only 7 days. Everything else remaining equal, this increase represents over £2 million of incremental annual sales for this company. You won’t want to miss the next post!
If you’d like to know more about website conversion rate testing now, please contact us today.