Webtrends Optimization

Selecting the right page to test is possibly the most important decision of an optimization campaign.  You can have great ideas, the technology and talent behind you, but if you pick the wrong page you could be doing a lot of work for minimal return.

So how do you get the biggest bang for your buck with testing?  Here’s a quick list of things to look for in a page:

• A single, specific and easy to measure conversion goal
• Sizable conversion traffic (at least 200 conversions in a week)
• A page that suffers from poor design or unclear conversion goal
• No large technical hurdles to implementing and executing the test
• A conversion rate that’s lower than comparable pages

Attacking pages with these attributes will get you some easy wins and help establish testing in your company.  Typically landing pages are the best pages to optimize, especially if they have the end conversion goal on the page, e.g. a form submission, download or click-out.

From there, I would move onto other pages in the funnel, taking a look at bounce rates to help determine where you need to help push visitors further into the funnel.  If there are no other pages in the funnel, find other poor or under performing pages on your site and take a look at them according to the rules above.

The main idea is to see that testing is a process and that just because you have ideas to improve a page, does not mean it is the best page to spend your time improving.

Photo credit: lepiaf.geo (CC)