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 

 

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?

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...