Webmaster Papers




Google
 
Web webhostingpapers.com




/pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">

How To Increase Your Conversion Rate or What Most People Miss When It Comes To Optimization


Everybody talks about the importance of testing your sales copy or a page layout. After all, proper testing can help you modify your page in a way that will drastically increase your conversion rate.

In this article, I would like to describe a way to shorten the amount of time it takes to test your pages and to increase the probability of success.

Before I go any further, I would like to introduce a few concepts and notions that will be used in this article.

Attribute -- a specific visual or conceptual element of a page, an ad creative, or a sales letter (used in fine-grained performance comparison testing). A few examples of what might be considered attributes:

  • headline text

  • headline font

  • headline color

  • order button size

  • order button color

  • order button text

Please note that even though those six things are related to only two elements, they are all separate attributes.

Attribute value ? some particular setting of an attribute.

Here are a few examples of values:

  • order button color, red

  • order button color, green

  • order button text, "Buy Now"

  • order button text, "Add To Cart"

I just listed two values for two separate attributes.

Significant attribute -- an attribute that affects the performance of a page.

Insignificant attribute ? an attribute that does not affect (or has little effect on) the performance of a page.

There are some obvious significant attributes that are universal for everybody.

One example of such significant attribute is a headline.

It has been proven many times over that changes in a headline have a huge impact on the performance of a campaign or an offering, in any medium for any industry. You can find a lot of information about universal significant attributes in any book that deals with testing and response rates.

A much harder problem would be trying to identify significant attributes that are unique to your site, product, audience, or traffic source.

As I described in my report called "How To Win The AdWords Game," the famous 20/80 rule applies to attribute testing just as well as it applies to many other things in our lives. In other words, 20% of the attributes you improve will produce 80% of overall performance increase.

Out of 100 attributes you decide to test, testing 80 attributes would be a waste of time. This is the reason many people fail to realize the importance of small attributes.

After all, if you follow the conventional wisdom of testing only one attribute at a time, you end up with no visible results and a firm belief that small attributes do not affect conversion. It is only logical to quit after testing 10 different attributes, one at a time, and having to wait one week for each attribute. The truth is, you have most likely spent that 10 weeks testing your insignificant attributes.

Since there is no way to know in advance which ones of your attributes are significant, the only reasonable thing to do is to test. You need to test and find out which attributes have the most effect on your visitors' behavior before you start testing different values of those attributes.

Let me give you a simple example of what I mean:

You need to establish that a color of an order button is in fact a significant attribute before attempting to find the best producing color for that button. If you start testing different colors when that attribute is not significant, you just waste your time.

So how can you find which attributes are significant and which are not in a reasonable amount of time? It's simple. You need to test in parallel.

You need to think up as many different attributes as you can and create different values for each of them. After that, you need to present a random set of attribute values to each new visitor, and keep the same values for returning visitors. Once you do that, you need to collect and track your test data to measure performance based on the sets of values.

For example, let's assume you tried the following attributes (with a set of values):

  • a color of an order button: blue, green

  • a text of an order button: "Buy Now", "Add To Cart"

  • a color of the font that lists the price: red, black

That way, one visitor might see a blue "Buy Now" button next to the red price, while another one might see a green "Add To Cart" button with the black price, and yet another one might see a green "Buy Now" button with the red price, and so on.

With this set-up, you get 8 combinations of three attributes.

Once you ran a test, you got the following conversion rates:

order button, blue = 1.53%


order button, green = 1.52%

text of a button, "Buy Now" = 1.95%


text of a button, "Add To Cart" = 1.01%

color of price, red = 1.51%


color of price, black = 1.49%

From this data, you can tell that you got the most performance difference by changing the text of an order button. This is your significant attribute. Forget about the other two for now and start testing the text of a button.

You can take this concept a step further and test combinations of attributes. You might find that changing a color of the price together with a text of the order button produces better results than changing the color alone. I will not cover this topic now, but will write about it in the near future.

For now, let's just concentrate on picking stand-alone attributes that show to be significant to the performance of your page.

Once you have identified those attributes, it's time to start tweaking their values and test results, also in parallel. You need to apply the same concept, to testing values of attributes this time.

Keep in mind, that small attributes are often unique to your site and your audience. What might work for you, might not work for other people. Nevertheless, if you can correctly identify your small, but significant attributes, you should be able to increase your conversion rate. The effect of those small attributes might not be as significant as with headlines or other well-known attributes, but the more attributes you find and optimize the higher you increase the overall performance of your page.

Copyright 2004 Konstantin Goudkov

If you would like to receive more of my tips, ideas, articles, and reports about testing, tracking, conversions, marketing, and sales - send an e-mail to: newsletter@in-the-name-of-profit.com

About The Author

Konstantin Goudkov is an affiliate manager with www.GenericGifts.com. He specializes on visitor tracking, split-run testing, and discovering ways to increase conversion rates for different presentation / action scenarios.

RELATED ARTICLES


Building Your First Web Site?
Before doing anything on the technical side, you need some kind of basic idea to work with. I suggest first getting some paper and a pencil. Start by sketching a layout of how you would like your web page to appear. For example, a simple title at the top, the area in which you would like any content, pictures and so on. Now its time to do some programing!
Creating a Basic Web Design Template
A "template" is simply a design format which you can apply to all (or most) of the pages in your web site. The first advantage of using a "template" system is that it allows you to make your most important design decisions at the beginning, and then just focus on content. The second advantage is that it allows you to quickly create new pages based on your standard design.
Affordable Website Design In Manchester
If you have a business, big or small you may be thinking of getting yourself a website.
Be Inspired to Create Better Websites
Being a writer, when I was asked to do some research into what makes a good website, of course I straightaway went to check out all of my favorite authors. After sifting through a few standard sites I remembered to look at one of my all time respected writers-Paulo Coelho. Judging by how many books he has sold he is obviously a lot of people's favorite, and his website is exactly what you'd want to keep the fans happy.
Web Copy - What You Should Know First
Just what is web copy? Some people think that web copy is anything that is written on a web page. But that is "content" and it is decidedly different than web copy. Simply stated, web copy is the copy that is used to sell anything on a web page. So now you say, but that's "sales copy." And you would be partly correct, but traditional direct mail copy and web copy are two different animals.
Internet Tip of the Week: First Impressions
First impressions are extremely important if you hope to do business on the Web. After you refine your ads, and if you make your pitch to a targeted group, you will start to get visitors to your web site. Here is where many would be entrepreneurs drop the ball.
To Flash, or Not to Flash
When considering whether or not to incorporate Flash into your website, you must also consider the target market you are trying to reach.
How To Design Your Web Site With CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to create fast loading pages, increase your search engine rankings, and modify your whole site with one style sheet. So why don't more people use them? This is because they got so used to html design and are afraid or too lazy to upgrade their skills. Some will also use ready made templates that contain flashy graphics, bloated code and sometimes even contains hidden code embedded in the page.
If Content is King who is Queen?
It's been said again and again, when it comes to getting people to visit your site (and stay there for more than 5 seconds), the quality of your content rules supreme. But once you've bowed to interest, saluted relevance and kow-towed to originality, who else must you pay homage to for recognition in the court of website stickiness?
Color Psychology in Marketing
On the internet we don't deal with face to face selling. The internet is a visual and psychological medium. The words, or sales copy, on your website have by far the greatest psychological impact on your visitors and thus becomes your most important communication and sales tool.
To Hire or Not to Hire a Website Designer
In the early years of the internet the actual design of a website was either very basic or had to be done using a software package that needed a specialist to use it. Not surprisingly, website designers were in short supply and could command huge fees for their services. All that has changed dramatically and website design is not such a complicated procedure as you might think.
Has Your Design Firm Run Amuck With Your Web Site?
What's happening to good web site design? Somehow we creative types at interactive and traditional ad agencies have run amuck - we're building web sites that may dazzle the senses, but don't really communicate much about our client's business or products and services!
Usability and Considerate Design
I hate to imagine that in your web development project team meetings, the one thing that will be overlooked is consideration for the end user. Yet, how many white boards have you seen lately that have "ease of use", or "be polite to customers" scribbled anywhere on them? Rather, the discussion hits on revenue generation, business requirements, colored backgrounds and information architecture. All good things, of course, but I'm quite sure you all want somebody to use it too, correct?
Web Page Building for Beginners 4
Page ranking by search engines such as Google are not only overrated but unusually explained by "experts" in the SEO field. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is needed to get your website placed at the top of a web search. I have no truck with someone wanting to get their pages placed in the number one or two spot from a search, but page ranking has nothing to do with that whatsoever and I can assure the reader that I can prove this to anyone with a computer. In fact, if you will just do a search for "writing critic" you will find www.homewriters.com near the top and since I own that site, I can explain to everyone how it got there and why. But at one time, I had four out of the top five spots on Google for this very same search. And by the way, my pages had no rank at all when they were first placed in the top positions by Google and Yahoo!
Use Exclusive Content - When Reprint Articles Dont Do Enough
There is no doubt that reprint articles can serve lots of search engine traffic to your site... All you have to do is to check your traffic logs and you will see how much traffic finds your site via one of the major search engines, as a result of those reprint articles being located on your website.
How to Create an Enjoyable Web Page Design
Novice and professional designers alike ? you may probably be skilled enough of any one or all of the techniques in creating a Web page and designing them. However, not all designs, even those made by authorities in the field, prove to be enjoyable and entertaining enough for the users. This is a fact that we hope does not irk some of our design enthusiasts and discourage them from honing their skills.
How to Create a Favicon for Your Web Site
One of the simplest things you can do to give your site 'identity' and to make it stand out from other sites is to use a favicon (favourite icon). They are the little logos that go next to the website listing in your favourites folder, and pop up in other places, (depending on your browser and operating system). To see one, go to www.bigwowwebhosting.com. Bookmark the site, open another browser window and then go to open the bookmark you have just made. The 'B' next to the words 'Big Wow Web Hosting- Home' is the favicon.
Be Friendly to Search Engines
The object of search engines is to give their visitors a list of web pages relevant to the search words, in the order of relevance to the search words. So what do they want from websites?
Long Copy Sales Letters on the Web: Hype or Not?
I have written before about long sales copy on the web. But I have more to say on the subject.
How To Create A Stunning Drop Capital Effect On Your Web Pages
Drop Capitals are frequently used in many newspapers, books and magazines in the offline world.� You will frequently see the large capital letter sinking down into the first paragraph of articles, stories and chapters in the majority of publications you come across.