Webtrends Optimization

You and your competitor’s all have the same landing pages.  You have a hero shot of the product, a big call to action button and short, punchy copy.  Or maybe you’re already ahead of your competitors and have run a few tests on your page, picking up more conversions on the way.  In either situation, you’ll eventually hit a wall and struggle to get additional lift.  So how do you continue to improve?

Go for broke.  Try something you’ve never tried before.  It might end up being a total failure, but it also might give you the lift you want.

The gamble you make with optimization can end in 2 ways:

• You lose X amount of conversions over the week or two that the test is running
• You gain X amount of conversions for the effective lifetime of the page

The possible upside dwarfs the downside by a large margin and, either way, you learn something new and can optimize the next test more successfully based on what you learned.

Luckily, with skill and experience, the risks of testing are minimized, however beating a strong page is never easy or guaranteed.  But when you do find something new that works or see that your current page still is a champ, you can rest assured that you’re doing all you can to drive conversions.

A beginner’s mistake is to test every idea with every test. This is the most obvious way of being efficient. If I can test 50 things in a week, why not?

In my experience, efficiency has more to do with careful test design and doing things right the first time, than trying to test everything and rushing the process. By testing a few big ideas quickly and then designing the next test based on those results, you can do a set of small tests and get answers fast without having to risk your page to many bad ideas.

Every test should have specific questions its trying to answer. Not just “What’s the best performing page?” but questions that lead to that. A car salesman doesn’t blindly try every tactic in the book get you to buy a car, a real salesman probes you with a few questions and changes their technique accordingly.

That’s how you should design your tests.

Here’s an example test plan that works for most clients:

• Step 1 (Split Test) – Find an optimal template/design: What template and/or design effectively gets visitors to stick, click and convert? At this stage, you aren’t testing messaging yet, you’re merely re-skinning and moving elements around to find a good design. Some techniques to use are simplifying the page by de-emphasizing unimportant content (shrink company logo, move ads to the bottom of the page) and emphasizing core content (moving 3rd party validation near the call to action) and adding more whitespace to the page to enhance readability. These are in addition to a well done creative design. This test usually has the greatest impact, however it all depends on your current page and the audience. (Read more on template testing)
• Step 2 (Multivariate Test) – Find the biggest converting segment: This test focuses on finding the correct messaging by appealing to different segments that you know and hypothesize visit your page. If your product was Google Apps, you might test appealing to business users and freelancers. Or if you are selling a cell phone, you might test features against benefits.
• Step 3 (Multivariate Test) – Find the perfect way to communicate to the segment: Step 2 points you in the right direction, but this step helps you find the exact place you should be with your page. Use what you learned (freelance messaging won) and try variations on that winning theme to really grab your audience and give them what they want. Also, step 2 may have revealed 2 or more segments that are worth targeting. If you can segment them out, run multiple tests that are customized for each segment, and you’ll raise conversions even higher.

The alternative is to test 50 ideas of which many of the ideas overlap. Why test any ideas that are remotely similar until you know that they work in general? If I go to a dealership wanting a sports car and the dealer offers me 5 colors of minivans, I’m still not going to buy a minivan. Show me 4 types of cars, let me pick the one I like and then we might talk about color.

Let your visitors lead you!

This really is a simple process, but it drives results. Be methodical to be efficient. By course correcting in each test, you get closer and closer to what you need and don’t spend a lot of time testing losing elements. Follow a test plan like this and you’ll get results and learn a lot about your core converting visitors.

I just received a link to an amazing resource from MarketingExperiments, it’s a compilation of great webinar summaries and case studies that they have done. They cover topics from landing page optimization to price testing to PPC and more. While not everything is about testing specifically, all their advice and ideas can be tested, which is why I think you all will find it valuable.

All testing should be carefully designed; it should be focused on best practices and tactics that are predicted to connect with the audience. You should take risks when testing, but they should be calculated risks.

Check it out and soak up some knowledge on optimization and get ideas to test on your site.

I try to keep this blog strictly about testing, but I have to make an exception. One of the biggest reasons I am working at Widemile is because I believe it has a great future ahead of it and our announcement today is part of that future.

There are two exciting parts to the announcement: the first is that we are revealing our new optimization platform, which has been designed with agencies in mind, and second, we have 13 partners lined up to begin using our new optimization platform. That list is comprised of these amazing companies: Ascentium, Avenue A | Razorfish, Brand Digital, Closed Loop Marketing, DDB in Seattle, Palazzo Intercreative, POP, Portent Interactive, Red Bricks Media, SolutionSet, Stratigent, TMP Directional Marketing, and ZeroDash1.

In celebration of this announcement, I have moved the blog to this domain, testingblog.widemile.com and redesigned the page to look more like our new website at www.widemile.com.

This is the start of a new era for Widemile and as my company matures, I plan to continue to blog and become an even more valuable resource to the online marketing and campaign optimization community.

Press release @ Widemile.com. 

Official press release in PDF format.

Every test teaches something. Almost every campaign test has the goal of raising conversion rates, but really the power of testing is in answering questions. It is just a happy coincidence that it raises your conversions at the same time.

Here are a few of the questions that can be answered with testing:

1. Is giving away a free widget worth while? Would a cheaper widget perform better?
2. Does promoting a few key products work better than promoting them all equally?
3. How much should this product be priced?
4. Does e-mail traffic respond to the same things as SEO and advertising traffic?
5. What benefits are consumers interested in?
6. Will a discount offer make up in conversions, what is lost in revenue per sale?
7. Do banner ads reduce conversions?
8. Is an extra learn more page more effective than a longer page? Is extra information even necessary?

Answering these questions is pretty easy, but you have to think about them beforehand. Design your test so that it asks questions and offers answers. Figure out what questions you want to ask and based on those, give a few separate and distinct answers in the form of variations of your page.

The easy ones are the ROI questions, e.g. giving away widgets, discounts, banner ads, and pricing. Just include them on or off in the test and/or with different amounts. At the end, do a ROI analysis comparing the conversion rates of each variation you test.

If you are wondering if one group of traffic responds differently to a campaign than another, segmentation is what you need. Separately track those segments, but don’t forget to design your test with answers too. Make your variations appeal to different audiences and your segments will be pulled towards the one they like the most with their conversions as proof.

If you want to learn what your customers are looking for, do some market research through testing. Test different types of benefits and see which get the visitors to convert, e.g. technical (this camera contains 1 gb of memory) versus lifestyle (this camera stores 100’s of wedding and birthday pictures).

You can test these ideas in an A/B split test or a multivariate test, but a multivariate test is much quicker and will allow you to test multiple questions and answers simultaneously.

Testing gives you a lot of answers and the better you design those questions into your tests, the more sense those answers will make of your data. Conversion rates are always important, but focusing solely on them won’t get you great results time after time. Think about testing in terms of learning more about your audience and you will find continual improvement in your campaigns.