We all know that you have to work your butt off to get anywhere. Same with conversion optimization. In order to get results you could be proud of, you need to put in the effort and hours. But how are you spending that effort?
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about conversion rate optimization: lots of people are running bad tests without even knowing it. They’re making decisions based on false positives, they’re acting on inconsistent data, they’re avoiding the issue of sample pollution – I could go on.
When I look back at the most important work I have done with my current company or any of the over 300 other websites that I have worked with, by far the most important work I do is in changing how groups think and operate. So much of optimization is about asking people to go past their comfort levels and their inherent biases and asking them to act rationally. At least 90% of the time and effort I put in is in dealing with these much harder and deceptive factors in success of a program.
Lots of people on the internet are running a/b tests, can I just copy their winning tests? Let other people do the failing, I’ll just test (or implement) the winning stuff. Good idea, right?
Imagine you’ve been working on optimizing a site for a while now, say 3, 6 or even 12 months.
You’ve had solid winners each month, and you’re confident in the test results. These are not imaginary lifts. But now your conversion rate looks the same as when you started. How do you explain this to the boss/client?
Over half of your site elements don’t affect conversion rate the way you think they do. How to find out which elements help and which hurt your conversion rate? The solution is existence testing.
So what’s this all about? Unicorns, Useful Best Practices and Optimisation Experts — all rather rare and mystical beasts.
If I were to tell you – what would you do with that information? Honestly, think about it and see if you can answer that.
At CXL Live 2015 we had an amazing a/b split testing panel featuring statistics and testing gurus Lukas Vermeer from Booking.com, Matt Gershoff from Conductrics and Yuan Wright from Electronic Arts. And the audience asked some of the toughest testing questions ever. All of them got answered.
Free trials are to SaaS applications as keys are to locks. The right one gets you in right away, but sometimes you have to try a few before you find the one that works.
For many SaaS and cloud service providers, 100% of customers sign up for a free trial as part of the sales process — yet one study suggested that even the best-in-class of SaaS marketers were losing a staggering 75% of those who signed up for a free trial before they entered their credit card details.