How to test

Site Reference Internet Marketing Articles-25

Building a successful and profitable site will ultimately depend on the amount of traffic your site receives. The content you produce and how much effort goes into promoting your site will help attract visitors and dictate the quality and how targeted that traffic is, but ultimately, how well your traffic converts will be the deciding factor in whether or not you have a successful and profitable web site.
Conversion rates are well documented as being poor across the internet. Between 1 and 3% conversion rates seem to be an almost standard rate across the web. Calculating a sites conversion rate is relatively straight forward; If 2 visitors out of 100 convert then your site has a 2% conversion rate. Most marketers will accept this and then focus on increasing the levels of visitors to their site, which in truth is never a bad thing. But it is important to remember that it is often easier to increase a sites conversion rate rather than its traffic and here are some of the best ways of doing that.
The road to increasing a sites conversion rate lies with the traffic it already receives, how that traffic got to your site, what pages they landed on, the keywords they used and the pages they viewed once they did hit your site. To get a clear view of your traffic you will need Google Analytics and you will also need to set up goals, conversions and funnels for your site. The data stored in your analytics program will help to give you a clear picture of your traffic and what they are doing on your site. You will also get to see what actions lead to a conversion, the pages they landed on before converting and the content they viewed that prompted them to take the action that you wanted them to. Replicating the elements that are successful will help to increase conversion rates on other sections of your site.
Google analytics will paint a picture of why some visitors converted while others didn't. Using another tool by Google called website optimiser will also help your conversion rates. Your Analytics program will tell you which pages on your site helped to convince a visitor to take the action you wanted them to. Google's website optimiser will tell you want elements on that page and in what combination will return the best conversion rate.
How to test?
If you are new to Google optimiser, then use a simple A/B test, this will allow you to test 2 versions of a page against each. Once you add the java script to the pages you want to test Google will begin to show the competing pages to your visitors and once it has gathered enough data to make a comprehensive decision on which page has yielded the best conversions you will have a winner. A/B testing will allow you to familiarise yourself with how testing works and the processes involved, to move your testing to a new level you will need to test the different pages elements and what combination of these elements will work best and you can do this with a multivariate test.
Test every element on a page and test multiple versions of each element
Google will take a lot of work out of putting these tests together. But it's very tempting to set up multiple elements and just let the test run. Unless the page you are testing gets thousands of hits a day you will wait a long time before the results of your tests are in. Keep your tests small and you will see results and improvements in your conversion rates much sooner.
Improving your conversion rates is usually a slow process and to do it successfully you will need to have in-depth knowledge of your site, the traffic it receives and what has convinced your visitors to convert in the past. Once you know this you can build on this success and further improve your conversion rate.
This is a guest from eMobileScan head of online marketing. Who are a leading European provider of industrial handheld computers like theMotorola MC65 and barcode scanners like the Motorola Ls2208.