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 

 

Use these checks or take the quiz to analyse your landing page and find areas for improvement. We recommend that you measure and Split test any change you make to ensure that they are positive.
Answer each of the questions as honestly as you can and tally the number of “Yes” responses to arrive at your score. The score will suggest just how good the page is. Then take the “No” responses and create a to-do-list of things to improve on your page

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1.	Is the design of the page professional? Does it convey quality & represent the brand? If the page looks cluttered, if you use multicolured styled fonts and if you use any centred text choose No. If the page does not look professional it does not matter how strong your message is, visitors will not stay to read it.
2.	Is the main headline consistent with the message of your ad for the traffic source? You need to ensure that the transition for the ad to page is seamless - Look at your traffic sources and and referring search engine keywords.
3.	Is the unique selling proposition conveyed clearly and concisely? Does it answer, What is it this about and Why should I be interested? In a 5 second test could someone tell you what the page is about?
4.	Is your landing page focussed on just one goal? free of unnecessary distractions? A challenge for the homepage when you need to juggle multiple objectives for the entire site. But always keep the goal in mind. Focus.
5.	Do you use relevant photos or video of your product /service being used in context? Answer no if you are using obvious cheesey stock images.
6.	Are you using headings and bulleted lists to convey the message clearly and concisely? Breakup long blocks of copy.
7.	Are you only asking for just the essential information on your lead gen forms? Every field in your form creates friction (be honest)
8.	Is your call to action the most obvious thing on the page? Does it appear above the fold? Use design to make the call to action stand out such as colour, size and depth.
9.	Does your call to action explicitly describe what you will receive when you click on it? Answer no and give yourself a chinese burn if you have a submit button.
10.	Are you displaying elements of trust such as testimonials or affiliations? Make sure they are credible and real.
11.	Are you providing a strong incentive for users to take action? Free delivery, for a limited time. etc.

 

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

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?