Website / Landing Page Conversions - test, test, test

I just wanted to share an experience that I've recently had.

I've had a website running for a business of mine that has proven successful (profitable for over 10 years). Once I got the website fine-tuned I turned my attenton to marketing the website (getting links, building credibility, ppc, seo, etc). So, for the past two years or so, I hadn't paid much attention to conversion rates, thinking that my site was well tuned. Well, strangely enough I ran across a blog of a competitor where they laid out their web design strategy and discussed THEIR conversion rates, which were considerably higher than mine.

So...I began to think about how to increase my rates. I used Google's website optimizer to do simple A/B testing and kept refining things. Thanks to this, I have increased my conversion rate over 40% over a 4 month period.

So..here are some lessons that I hope to share with you.
1. Always test. Don't get complacent with your website - always be testing your ads, testing landing pages (keep in mind, on most sites, every page is a landing page).
2. Don't assume what will work. I have factual data to support changes (thru Google) that often surprise me - changing a sentence, moving credibility marks (BBB etc) can make dramatic improvements.
3. More often that not - less is more. Less text, less choices generally, in my case, created more action.
4. Affiliations/Secure logos can sometimes help. I added a McAfee secure logo and gained about 5% conversion. That said, my customers appreciate security - I'd imagine there are industries where the logo wouldn't help at all.

Here are some of the resources that I used:

www.google.com/websiteoptimizer - free tool for testing pages
www.clicktale.com - heatmaps, literally watch what users do. Has a free version that will get you started.
www.sensible.com - Great book on web usability.

Hope this helps - it certainly makes marketing expenses more reasonable when you convert much more.

Care to share any success stories on converting users?

Rep+ to you.

The internet is an always morphing tool. Keeping up with the changes can become a full time JOB. And it is really one JOB that I do not want. However, there is is money to be made (or saved) in learning the skills associated with any number of these services.

I have acquired skill in reading and writing code which I can now apply to current and future business' that I develop and one of my business partners is rapidly gaining a following offering SEO analysis.

Santiago, i forgot to respond to this. What were some things you tested? what about the copy, anything tested there?

Would love to hear more as thats what im doing more and more often is testing different things out. It's really fun!

Lighthouse -

In a nutshell, what I found is that over the years I focused so much on on-page SEO techniques that I forgot that my site is supposed to be a driving the user towards products they want to buy and order. In some respects, I think SEO can clash with a great page to sell your product.

So..in my case I started with the question, "What do I want my users to do on this particluar page?" That list of actions should be quite short, if designed correctly. That premise became the focal point - I varied colors, button styles, and placment and generally worked out from there. I think placement had the biggest impact. What I found is my pages used to have lots of extraneous information that really was useless to the sales process and in many cases turned a user off.

A really good stat to look at is how long does a user spend on a page and where do they go after the page. Iniitally, I found users clicking on something, taking a look, then backing up..only to come back a few minutes later. I don't really want my users to hunt and peck - I need them to easily understand what to click to get where, not "explore".

The thing that is interesting to me is the lifecycle of my site so far is as follows:
1. New - basically a brochure.
2. Focus on SEO, get some rankings and traffic
3. Really focus on SEO, get lots of top 5 rankings and traffic.
4. Focus on conversions of that traffic.


What I've found is that with the removal of extraneous text & images (which I thought helped my rankings), I have so many off-page SEO things helping me (PR 7, 1000's of links, etc) that my rankings really aren't hurt.

Rep++ Excellent post!

Search engine rankings and even visits mean next to nothing if they can't convert to buys. This is a great point and something to always keep in mind.

It is also great timing for me, as I am currently learning a lot about SEO, so I will keep your advice in mind.

Thanks Matt.

I guess my whole point is this: Your commercial website has nothing to do with what you want, it is everything about what your customers/masses want.

The web is a great place for you to analyze this data, I'd hate to have a retail store where the information is a little less easy to obtain/test..

Santiago,

This post was very informative. I really like the clicktale software. Once I get my site up and running clicktale is a must have in order to grow the business.



Thanks..