While there are no universal rules in conversion optimization, there are some things that tend to work more often than not. This article will give you some of these tactics to test for yourself.
When most beginners start with conversion rate optimization, they get carried away by the rosy picture of A/B testing. Let’s test button colors! Or maybe call to action text! That should get us a win of at least 30-50%…I think.
Unless you’re a giant like Amazon, you need to go beyond the random let-us-change-button-color-today kind of tests to move the needle through A/B testing. It’s not about tactics. It’s about the reaction your design creates in the mind of your visitors.
Normally, I dig into massive amounts of data, but today, I think we should talk about something that’s a little bit more subjective & open to interpretation – design.
Specifically, your design’s first impression, how long it takes to make that impression, and whether or not that impression is communicating the right things (or anything for that matter) about your brand.
In a 2013 study by eConsultancy & RedEye, surveying almost 1,000 client-side & agency marketers, it was found that 60% found A/B testing to be “quite valuable” to their business.
Yet, only just over a quarter (28%) report being satisfied with their conversion rates.
Last Friday, Oli from Unbounce & Peep teamed up for the second episode of Page Fights where they tore apart contestants landing pages & give them actionable advice & best practices on how to make their landing pages better.
The winner of Page Fights gets 1 free year of Unbounce’s Pro 99 account, a half hour private consultation with Peep & free early membership into the CXL Institute.
In this second episode, they reviewed 5 different landing pages with the page owners & went into more detail than Peep normally does in our regular website reviews, so hopefully you’ll find more value in it.
Here’s something that won’t come as a shock to people who work for big companies: not everyone is on-board with the idea of conversion optimization and testing.
In an ideal world, everyone would be excited by a data-driven approach & the idea of building a conversion culture is something the entire organization would be excited about from day one.
BUT this is the real world.
There are egos and opinions and red tape and executives who wet themselves any time there’s even the slightest chance they can be proven wrong.
Even worse, if your company is one with a silo mindset, where designers go over here, marketers are over here & IT belongs in a cave somewhere over there – the thought of even having one cohesive “Conversion Team” might seem laughable, if not altogether impossible.
For all of the talk about how awesome (and big, don’t forget big) Big data is, one of the favorite tools in the conversion optimization toolkit, A/B Testing, is decidedly small data.
Optimization, winners and losers, Lean this that or the other thing, at the end of the day, A/B Testing is really just an application of sampling.
You take couple of alternative options (eg. ‘50% off’ v ‘Buy One Get One Free’ ) and try them out with a portion of your users. You see how well each one did and then make a decision about which one you think will give you the most return.
If you’ve heard of Dropbox, Eventbrite, LogMeIn or Qualaroo, you’re familiar with my work.
I’m Sean Ellis & I’d like to tell you how Conversion Rate Optimization played a critical role as the growth engine for the companies I’ve worked with. I’m going to lay out the specific tests & processes I’ve used to grow these startups into incredibly valuable businesses.
How important is CRO? It was the key to our success in scaling LogMeIn to a publicly-traded company, and helped us optimize our referral program at Dropbox, whose latest funding figures peg it’s value at a rumored $10 billion.
In today’s review I’m reviewing 2 different ecommerce product pages.
In today’s review I’m assessing whether websites in question could do anything to better get people to take action.