The point of website optimization is to increase conversion rates. Similarly to optimizing a landing page, website AB optimization involves exhausting testing. It involves marketing tests across a few different areas. The first of which is split testing, also known as AB testing. How does one go about split or AB testing their website? Different from a landing page, you probably already have a stream of traffic, Google organic search results, and SEO. You should have brand traffic coming in from keywords related to your brand, social media traffic, and more. Website AB testing can test different variations of your content to increase traffic. If you’re not sure you have existing traffic, you should look in your Google Analytics or website analytics program of choice to make sure that you do have some sort of traffic. We recommend at least 20-25 unique visitors a day to achieve a suitable sample size, preferably a lot more.
What is the point of website conversion rate optimization?
Website conversion optimization refers to just improving the elements in the design of the site so that people actually complete an action. The first step is identifying in your site what the call to action is. Does your website offer an eBook? Or does your website offer a free consultation? You need to figure out your offer, and what it’s asking your visitor to do when they come to your site. if you don’t have a clear call to action, then website optimization is probably not a good fit for you. It works best as a metric that you can track and improve, for example testing different colors, buttons, or setups and layouts of the page to increase calls. If you don’t have a conversion point on your site, such as an informational site or blog, you may not achieve good results from conversion rate optimization. If you are an ad publisher it can be more helpful. It can involve more in-depth optimization of the ads themselves. With website optimization you need to have something to test. Without a call to action, such as in a branding site, you can measure key metrics such as average time on site, return visitors, and other such metrics that can tell you if the test are running are actually effective. To have a good test, you need to have some metric to test against.
Once you’ve established your goal, you have to identify what to test. At SearcherMagnet we have a list of over 100 items that we routinely test, such as:
- Page titles
- Page headlines
- Page subtitles
- Page copy
- Font size
- Number of form elements (Greater or fewer)
- Color and design of a form submit button
- Layout of the page
- Images
- Add or remove video
- And the list goes on
If you hire SearcherMagnet for a website optimization, we will work with you to find a list of things to test and we will run them with you and report the results. The nice thing about our split testing software is that it doesn’t’ require any alterations to the core architecture of your site. It’s a simple Javascript fragment that would take only seconds for any competent web developer to install. Once installed, our marketing people can run an unlimited amount of tests at any time without a developer having to change anything on the site. Once we’ve completed the battery of testing on the site, we simply provide the winning variant to your developer for installation. This way you can do exhaustive testing of your components without paying outrageous web development costs for each variation. Say you were trying to test ten different variations, in an older model a web developer might charge you 3-6 hours of development time for each test, which could easily end up costing $1500-3000. Our fragment based technology is especially useful to site owners of very complex or large sites, such as ecommerce, web apps, any site that takes payments, anything with custom programming or scripting. It allows us to have the same marketing based technology. Our philosophy is to divorce the technology from the marketing and let the marketing do its job.
Why do I Need to Split Test my Site?
A lot of site owners will think that because they’ve had their website for years and it seems to be working alright, if it’s working, why change it? This is a great question. Our answer is usually what if we could increase the conversion rate of your site by just 10%? Consider how this small increase could compound over time. If you get 5 calls per month, and overall in a month you get 100 unique visitors, you only have a 5% conversion rate; not very good. If we increased this just 6-10%, this would be a whole additional call per month, nearly a 20% increase in leads. This is a change that you can benefit from over time, not a temporary result. Website optimization does not produce temporary results. On average, split testing can usually increase this conversion rate anywhere from 20% all the way up to 200%. The actual gains that you could realize can be much larger than you anticipate. It is often interesting to us not being in the “business” of web design. SearcherMagnet has a very unique and focused approach to web design that is direct response. It is often surprising to me that customers will hire very respected and expensive web designers who can charge them tens of thousands of dollars to create a stunning web presence, but then don’t do any testing to see how the design responds with their audience.
Another benefit of website optimization is to help you answer those nagging questions that you weren’t able to answer in the web design process. When you work with a web designer, there can be a bewildering array of questions. It can be difficult to decide on many of the elements, since it is a highly personal and complex process. You may be left with nagging questions, such as “Should I have made the footer blue?” “Should I have added pictures to every page?” “Should I have added video?” Instead of being bothered by these questions indefinitely, website testing can reveal the results of those changes.
