We’re always hearing from people who have websites that are quietly humming when they should be booming. The problem is that it’s next to impossible to know what the solution is. You could hire an expensive SEO firm, improve your meta tags, run Adwords or use any number of online marketing tools out there. Even if you close your eyes and pick something at random, it takes time to research, implement and run, and it’s almost never the best option for your business.

When Guy approached us he had a specific request – he was paying too much for Google Adwords and wanted us to show him how to get the most out of his advertising dollar. One of the things we stress is the importance of taking a holistic approach to websites’ optimisation. The question we always ask ourselves is “How can we increase traffic and conversion?"

Guy had the right idea – The Adwords campaign was not bringing in enough customers, and many that did come left without purchasing anything. In fact it was costing Guy an average of $16.48 in advertising for every single sale he made on the site. Instead of focusing on Adwords we asked if we could look at the big picture and make changes that would benefit the whole site.

Top-gear was already a great website with an impressive product range, but we were able to identify some key areas to work on that we believed could provide some big wins for Guy and his business. He agreed to let us do a thorough overview of his website and booked two hours results consulting with one of our specialists. After our initial review we felt that Top-Gear would benefit the most if we focused on perfecting the basic elements of a successful website. This way both paid and organic traffic will see the difference.

Designing a winning homepage

Once someone lands on your homepage you have a maximum of 7 seconds to make a great first impression. You better make sure what you offer is immediately clear and that you show why you’re the best solution for your customer’s needs.

• We identified a number of areas that could be improved to create more trust and credibility, promote top selling products and funnel more traffic into the right categories

Original page (click to enlarge)

New page (click to enlarge)

This is the part where we put on our white lab coats

We were pretty confident  that the changes we made would start showing some big wins for Guy’s business, but no optimisation would be complete without running a split test to scientifically prove the changes were working. This is also known as putting our money where our mouth is :)

The results speak for themselves. The redesigned homepage increased the conversion rate of his top selling knife by 240.2%. Because the homepage really pushed Guy’s impressive range of products, built trust and credibility by offering a money back guarantee and a free delivery incentive, more visitors bought something, resulting in an incredible 35% increase in conversion from June - September.

The biggest win for Guy is that his one off investment of 2 hours results consulting followed by a redesign and split test will continue to show dividends. Instead of paying an arm and a leg for traffic that didn’t end up buying anything, Guy increased his conversion rate, so now whether he decides to pump traffic in from Adwords, or leave it to the search engines to bring in customers, more people will exit through the checkout page.

We’re confident we can dramatically improve your online business as well.

We want to help... Please don't forget we are right here. We have a team experienced in achieving great results for NZ businesses. We can help you with Online Marketing, SEO, Results Consulting and more...Let us help you generate more sales and enquiries with your website.  Please talk to us

As the follow on from our previous Homepage radical redesign test we really wanted to see if an animation on the homepage would help to capture visitors attention and draw them into the website, or perhaps the additional load times would serve to put people off and the animation might distract users.

Original page

Following our 11 checks for Landing page optimisation we outlined a list of points for improving the page:

New page

The results

This test was run using the Zeald experiments software and shows reduced information for privacy reasons

What did we learn?

• In this case animation does help to improve conversion

What next?

I would like to see if different uses of the animation can help to improve conversion. For example,

1. what if the animation was used to support the USP,
2. what if it showed the actual products, not in context,
3. what if the video was used to promote incentive such as free shipping, guarantee etc 

Welcome to our first Split test experiment. We chose boltofcloth.co.nz to be our first guinea pig to test our new split testing tool; and they agreed :)
Bolt of Cloth are a Christchurch based company whose store was badly affected in the earthquake and they have subsequently moved their business entirely online. We decided to look at the homepage first, because it had the greatest number of visitors and meant that we would see some quick results. There were a number of changes that we felt should be made initially to accelerate the process. We decided that the first test should be a radical redesign.

Test Objectives: Sell products that produce the greatest revenue - Based on the website ecommerce report and in consultation with the client.

Original page

Following our 11 checks for Landing page optimisation we outlined a list of points for improving the page:

New page

The results

This test was run using the Zeald experiments software and shows reduced information for privacy reasons

What did we learn?

• The new Zeald split test software "Experiments" works really well :)
• The changes made to improve the homepage were positive & the split testing backed up these educated assumptions. The new page is an obvious winner after just a few days
• This is addictive :)

Now what?

1. Apply the improved design to the homepage
2. Use the improved homepage as the starting point for making minor tweaks to improve the design further
3. Test Animated image banner and free shipping

The single most effective method to improve the performance of your website

Split Testing is the single most effective way to increase the performance of your website. Split testing is not only effective, it is also an inexpensive way of making improvements to aspects of your website, using your own customers as a democratic tool to help make decisions. Who better to understand the needs and wants of your customers than your customers!

First you need to understand that building a successful website is a process of continual improvement, which involves:

• Establishing the goals of your website. i.e. sell products or generate enquiries
• Optimise your important website pages to achieving these goals - these pages are known as landing pages

So what are landing pages?

• A landing page is the first page a visitor to your site sees.
• Landing pages are often 'linked to' from marketing campaigns, social media and email campaigns.

Optimising a landing page

• For each landing page you need a goal. In many cases this will be to convert site visitors into sales or leads. An ecommerce homepage might be to “click through to a product”
• Improving a landing page involves increasing the number of goals achieved, or convert site visitors into sales or leads. This is known as the Goal conversion rate.
• Remember, your website is a leaky bucket full of holes and by plugging these holes you retain the precious customers and stop them from leaking out.You improve the number of customers who take the desired action you want them to. You improve the conversion rate of your pages and you improve the performance of your website in general.

Usually when you want to optimise your website you make changes based on a gut instinct, best practices, research, personal preference, previous experience and measuring your goal completions to give you an indication of which changes were positive or not. While this method is most likely better than nothing, this won't tell you exactly what is working or not working.

So what is split testing?

Split testing  involves running experiments on landing pages of your website. You choose a page you think needs improving and duplicate the page; the original page stays the same, while aspects of the duplicate page change. Traffic gets split between the two versions evenly and the split testing software tells you how the new page's conversion rate differed from the original. If you see a significant increase in goal conversion, you keep the highest performing page and continue the process of improvement by testing other aspects on a new page.

How does split testing work?

1. Pick a page that you think needs improving, starting with the most important pages that are used to complete the goals of your website.
2. Create a new version of that page and make changes you think will improve the performance of that page, changes that you think will help increase the number of goals your website visitors complete after viewing this page.
3. Setup a split test experiment using split testing software.
4. Run the experiment.  Your website will show each page in your experiment to alternate visitors.  The split test measures how many visitors you get to each page and how many of those visitors complete your website goals - like making an order, completing your enquiry form, signing up to your newsletter, or clicking through to your 'About us' page etc. The split test needs to be run long enough to prove conclusively that one page is a winner.
5. Replace the lesser performing page with the one that’s performing better. 
6. Repeat the process again. Measure, change, review. The idea is to keep optimising your important pages to continue improving your website’s performance.

The importance of finding a conclusive result

This is a scientific method of optimisation, relying on good accurate measurement and finding conclusive results that are statistically significant.

If your results are 50:50 - You don't have a conclusive result

If you don't have enough data to work from - You don't have a conclusive result

In order to collect enough data in the shortest amount of time, you need a reasonable amount of traffic to your website and a reasonable goal conversion rate to measure. You really want a conclusive result within a month. i.e. you don't want to be running a test for 3 years.

Split testing reports

The reports are a very important part of the split testing process. They need to make it very easy to accurately determine which page is the winner. As with any type of polling, it’s necessary to know just how precise the results of the statistics are.

That sounds easy

Where to from here?

This is the final and most important section in the whole process of establishing a successful website.  The Test, Measure & Tune phase is an ongoing process that should never end. 

Every successful website that I have witnessed is the result of consistent ongoing improvement.  You should look to make it part of your website culture.

If you want to develop a highly persuasive website then you must commit yourself to a system of consistent ongoing improvement and in order to do this successfully in your company,  then you will need to be following a ‘Test, Measure and Tune’ (TMT) process.

A website is comparable to just about any business.  If you set up a new company it is impossible (even for the most experienced professional) to establish any organisation that runs perfectly from day one.  Good businesses become great only through consistent ongoing improvements.  A website is no different.  It is impossible to get a website perfect from day one (no matter how good you are).  A fantastic website only becomes so through careful TMT!

Importance of testing

This is the final and most important phase in the whole process.  The Test, Measure & Tune phase is an ongoing process that should never end.  

Every successful website that I have witnessed is the result of consistent ongoing improvement.  You should look to make it part of your website culture.

If you want to develop a highly persuasive website then you must commit yourself to a system of consistent ongoing improvement and in order to do this successfully in your company,  then you will need to be following a ‘Test, Measure and Tune’ (TMT) process.

A website is comparable to just about any business.  If you set up a new company it is impossible (even for the most experienced professional) to establish any organisation that runs perfectly from day one.  Good businesses become great only through consistent ongoing improvements.  A website is no different.  It is impossible to get a website perfect from day one (no matter how good you are).  A fantastic website only becomes so through careful TMT

Choosing a success metric

In order to TMT your website it is imperative to have a measurable ‘success metric’ or ‘signal’;  an objective measure that you can use to know whether you’ve made something better or worse.   

The success metric that you will use depends on what area of your website you are specifically wanting to TMT.   A list of common success metrics are outlined below.

• Visits
  The Visits is the number of visits that have occurred to your website (or an individual page) over a certain period of time.  Visits are often further broken down into visits from New Visitors and Returning Visitors.   Visits are one of the most common and popular success metrics used by web marketers – especially when measuring the effectiveness of a promotional campaign.   The more visits generated by the campaign the more effective it is considered to have been.    However, visits often need to be combined with the next success metric – Conversion Rate, to truly determine the overall effectiveness of the promotional campaign.  Some campaigns can generate large numbers of  visitors but very few actual results as the campaign is targeting the wrong target of people or put another way – the visits are of low quality. 
   
• Conversion Rate (CR)
  The conversion rate is the most popular and common of all success metrics.  It is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of unique visits and multiplying the result by 100.  This s a great way of measuring the persuasiveness (or effectiveness) of a single web page (usually on the conversion pathway), or even an entire website.  
  
  It is very important when calculating this that you understand what constitutes a ‘conversion’ – which depends on what you are currently trying measure.  If it is the conversion of the entire website then your conversion will be your macro-conversion objective.     For some websites that might be an order,  a visitor submitting an enquiry form, registering for a free tool or signing up to the company e-zine.  For others it could be the number of visitors clicking on the ‘Contact Us’ page to locate the contact details for a company.
  
  However, if you are doing in-depth TMT you most likely will be trying to measure the conversion at a page level (or micro-action level) – i.e. you will want to measure what percentages of your visitors respond to individual calls to action.  Your micro-action might be ‘Add Product to Cart’, ‘Click here to find out more’ and any number of other things.
   
• Click Through Rate (CTR)
  The CTR success metric is usually associated with online advertising.  It is used to measure both the effectives of your online promotions (pay-per-click ads, banner advertisements, text ads, directory listings, email promotions and so on) and the effectiveness of any promotions placed on your site by other advertisers.  The CTR is calculated by dividing the total clicks on an item by the total visits to the page(s) that the promotion features on and multiplying the result by 100.
   
• Page Views Per Visit
  This is often to used to test the effectiveness of your website content.   It outlines how many pages an average visitor views before leaving your website.  It is often a good measure of the effectiveness of your pre-sales content and the overall value of your website to your visitors.  The Page Views Per Visit success metric is calculated by dividing the total number of page views by the total number of visits.
   
• Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)
  The RPV is used by e-commerce websites to measure how effective the website is at getting orders from its visitors.  The higher the RPV the more effective the site is at generating revenue.  The RPV is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the total number of visitors.

The conversion rate is often the easiest and best success metric to use within your TMT cycles.  But, depending on what you are trying to achieve, other success metrics are sometimes more appropriate.  It is important that you choose the right success metric for the job.

Understanding noise & latency

When planning your TMT cycles it is important to understand the concepts of ‘noise’ and ‘latency’ and the impact that they can have on your TMT cycles.   If you do not understand noise and latency you can end up coming to the wrong conclusions and making the wrong decisions because you have misinterpreted your results.

What is Noise?

Noise means any outside factors that can have an impact or skew the results of your test.  If you are not careful noise can cause the results of your test to be incorrect, which in turn will result in you making incorrect decisions. 

• Examples of noise which might impact the results of your test are below.
• Natural disasters (Volcano erupting, big storm etc)
• Commercial noise (Interest rate rise, stock market crash etc)
• Promotional noise (major changes in the promotion of your website)
• Publicity / Media noise (articles in magazines or newspapers about your industry or organisation)
• Competitive noise (competitor does something drastic or unusual in their webmarketing)
• Seasonal noise (Christmas, Easter, Mothers Day etc)
• Day of Week Noise (different results on different days)

You need to be asking yourself – what outside ‘noise’ could be impacting the results of this test.  Do I need to run the test for longer period of time?  Should I keep the length of test short?  Should I exclude results from a certain period of time from the overall test?

What is Latency?

On many occasions visitors will not immediately respond to your offers.  Sometimes they will take days, weeks or even months to respond to your offers.  This is called latency.  Even the most compelling, low-risk offers have a degree of latency.   High ticket offers and complex offers will often have very high latency.

If you are not aware of the latency associated with your test you can end up with the wrong result and in turn make a wrong decision.  Once you have stopped your test you will need to continue measuring your results for a period of time. 

Understanding the control

With any TMT cycle you need to have a ‘control’, ie what is  current best version,  and it is that you want to measure against.  Your control sets the standard.

Before you set up a test you want to know exactly what results your control produces.   You also should know the ‘latency’ associated with your control.

Planning your recipes

Once you know your success metric (‘signal’) and your control, you are ready to set up your recipes.  These are the variations to the control that you want to test.  You need to carefully plan your recipes before you start your TMT cycle.

There are an almost unlimited number of things that you can TMT but I would recommend that initially you focus on these elements in your recipes:

1. Headlines
2. Opening Hooks
3. Pictures / Hero Shots
4. Trust Building Elements
5. Pre-Sales Copy
6. Teasers and Short Copy
7. Bulleted Lists of Benefits or Features
8. Calls To Action
9. Pricing / Your Offers
10. Order Forms / Check-Outs
11. Length of Forms
12. Button & Link Messaging
13. Cross Sells & Up Sells
14. The P.S

In addition to testing the different elements outlined above it is often a good idea to test ‘element attributes’.  What I mean by this is: the element might be the headline.  But some element attributes might be font size, font colour and so on.  Examples of common element attributes are as follows.

• Size
• Alignment
• Style
• Colour
• Background Colour
• Position
• Bold / Italics / Underline

The options are almost endless.  Use your intuition here and create recipes that you think are likely to lead to a positive result.  Focus on the elements that that appear on the screen without needing to scroll first.

How to test

There are a number of different ways that you can conduct a TMT cycle.  Before we look at this though - a very common and valid question is: how long do I need to run my test before I can trust the results?  Or how many visitors do I need to have to each different recipe before I can trust the result of the test?
This is very difficult question to answer as it depends on the noise and the difference in the results between the control and the recipe.   Good testing software will tell you the ‘Confidence Level’ that your test has achieved (i.e. 60%, 90%, 95%, 99% etc).  However if you don’t have sophisticated testing software, as a general rule of thumb, I like to run my tests on a minimum of 500-1000 high quality visitors (quality prospects – not random clickers etc) before trusting the results.

Let’s take a look at the different ways to conduct a TMT cycle.

1. Basic Testing
   Run the control – run the recipe.  This sort of testing is very susceptible to the effects of noise.  Be very careful and think through any outside noise that may impact the results of the test.  And make sure you run large sample sizes to keep the confidence level of your tests nice and high.
    
2. Split Testing
   Split testing allows you to run the control and the recipe(s) at the same time with the traffic split between the two.  This helps you minimise the impact of any noise.   Split testing requires specialised software, but as long as you have it the software is simple to use.  If you are new to testing, split testing is a good place to start because it is easier to get solid scientific data, gain some testing experience and avoid many of the common pitfalls. 
    
3. Multivariate Testing
   Multivariate testing allows you to test many different variables at the same time using sophisticated statistical analysis.  Multivariate testing allows you to optimise a page as quick as possible but it requires powerful software, careful planning and it is complex to set up a successful TMT cycle.

Overview

When we redesigned the Zeald website, we wanted to test a radical redesign. We wanted to convey our company's USP, which is 'Smart Results Online' - helping you achieve amazing results online.

We realised that many other webdesign companies boast this same USP these days, so we wanted to prove that we are ahead of our competitors in this regard, and for a number of reasons. We wanted to let people know that we were the best at it, and we believed that we, unlike our competitors had the proof to back it up. But it is a bold claim and we realised that in New Zealand this could be a problem with the Tall Poppy Syndrome - so what better way to find out than to TMT it.

Hypothesis

Since it was not possible to test an entire page with Google Optimiser and also test multiple conversion goals, Google Optimiser was not going to work for us. So we had our R&D team build a new Add-on module for our websites, which our TMT consultants can use to very quickly and easily to setup and measure accurately, split tests such as this.

This is very important because it allows us to test our primary conversion goal to see if we improve the conversion rate, however it is just as important that we also know how our other conversion goals are impacted. For example we might find that we increase our primary conversion goal by X% but jeopardise our others and cost the company significant business.

Google Optimiser doesn't allow this kind of reporting on multiple conversion goals.

The Experiment

Because we rely on our Zeald website for a large percentage of our business leads, it was risky for us to launch a radical redesign and risk losing a large percentage of sales each month. So we restricted the views of the new design to just 10%.

The Original (the Control)

Test 1

In this homepage, we wanted to push our portfolio as we believed that many of our potential customers are more concerned about the design and are not aware of all the other elements that make a successful website.

Results

Tests	Conversion Goal 1 (% change compared to original)	Conversion Goal 2
	Original screen	Original screen
	30.7% decrease compared to original	10.6% decrease compared to original

These are the results we had from our first test of the split screen, which was tested without any back up pages. We will be running a second test with a back up article to see how it impacts the results.

Check back soon for our test 2 results...

This article is all about testing and improving your website results. Within your normal business you will always be looking for ways to make everything work better. You need to do the same with your website. The tune process can be summed up with three words – ‘Test’, 'Measure' and 'Tune'.

One of the reasons the Internet is a direct marketer’s dream, is just about everything can be measured automatically! If you’ve been in business for any length of time you will know how hard it can be to measure your results (and it takes a heap of time and effort). Website marketing is quite different– you barely have to lift a finger, it just happens!

Most people just don’t get how incredibly powerful this is!

If you understand what needs to be measured, then you can measure it, read the measurements and make adjustments to your website to improve your overall result. This is unbelievably powerful!

So, what do you need to measure?

Well that is a subject in our book– “Website Fundamentals – How to Generate Amazing Results Online! ”. But to save you sourcing the relevant section right now, the crucial parts follow…

Success Metrics

Within any business there are a number of simple success metrics that determine the performance of the business.

In the physical world, success metrics are– leads, conversion rate, average sale and margin. Let’s take a closer look at each of these:

• Leads
  A lead is a potential customer that has enquired about your product or service. The leads success metric represents the number of people that have enquired about your products or services over a particular period of time.

• Conversion Rate
  The conversion rate is the percentage of people that purchased products or services from you. A 20% conversion rate means that for every 10 leads you made two sales.

• Average Sale
  The average sale represents how much people usually spend with you. Each time customers buy from you, do they spend, on average $20, $200, or $2000?

• Margin
  The margin is the percentage of every sale that is profit– after all the costs are taken out. A 20% margin on a $1,000 sale means your profit was $200.

The most important thing to understand about success metrics is this –

If you can increase ANY ONE of the success metrics then your business will make more money!

It’s that simple.

If you want to run a successful business you need to know and understand success metrics and therefore how they influence your business. The same applies if you want to run a successful website– you need to understand success metrics on the Web and how they affect your website.

The key success metrics for a website that sells products, with transactions automatically completed online (an ecommerce website), are ‘visitors’, ‘conversion rate’ and ‘average sale’.

‘Visitors’ is a new success metric, which is a more accurate description of receiving a prospect on an e-commerce website. The ‘visitors’ success metric refers to the amount of ‘traffic’, or visitors, your website receives.

As with most businesses, the ‘margin’ is still determined by the physical aspects of the business (and includes the cost of running the website, so it is an expense that affects your margin).

The key success metrics for a website that is focused on generating enquiries (an Profile website) are ‘visitors’ and ‘conversion rate’.

An Profile website is designed to generate leads. Everything after the generation of the lead on the Profile website is still processed in the physical world.

An example of a company using an Profile website would be a service-oriented business, or a business with large custom-made products that are less suitable for making purchases and payments via an Ecommerce website.

So on the Internet, success metrics can be summarised as follows:

 

Website Success Metrics Summary
ecommerce Website	Profile Website
Visitors	Visitors
Conversion Rate	Conversion Rate
Average Sale

Learn How to Improve your Website Conversion Rate

Learn How to Increase your Number of Website Visitors

Learn How to Increase your Average Sale Amount

Experiments and investigations into website design theories and myths for improving the performance of a website.

Using various Zeald websites, the Zeald split testing tool, and following the Zeald "measure - review - tune" process, we blow the lid off various website design theories and myths; in the quest to increase website performance.

I invite you to share your feedback and involve yourself in the experiments and the interpretation of the results

If you have any theories or myths of your own that you would like to see tested, please let me know and I would be happy to investigate them for you - Please email me hamish@zeald.com

Banner Blindness

In our first experiment we test the phenomenon known as "Banner Blindness"