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Improve Landing Page Conversions With These 5 Split Tests

2009 April 7

presented by Karen Scharf: Helping You Improve Web Conversions

Are you satisfied with the conversion rate on your landing page? I hope the answer to that question – no matter what your conversion rate – is an emphatic “No!” Because no matter what your conversion rate is, there’s always the chance that it can be better. And you’ll never know how much money you’re leaving on the table until you start measuring, optimizing and testing.

If you’re a newbie to website testing, there are two different schools of thought as to how you should get started. The first says you should start with an “unimportant” page on your site. Use that page as your “practice field” to avoid making any grave mistakes while you’re learning the ins and outs of testing.

I, on the other hand, subscribe to the second school of thought: start with a high traffic web page so you can see results more quickly. If there’s one thing the internet era has done to all of us, it’s turned us into a society of “immediate gratification seekers”. We want results now. We get bored easily. We don’t want to wait for the answer.

The danger in starting your website testing with an “unimportant page” is that it will take too long to see any real results. You’ll grow impatient, you’ll get bored, and chances are you’ll abandon the concept of testing before you’ve had a chance to appreciate its amazing merits.

So let’s start with your highest traffic page (if you’re scared you’ll make a mess, start with the second or third highest traffic page - but don’t worry. As long as you back up ahead of time, anything you “mess up” can be undone!)

The page components you want to test are:

1. Your Headline

Without a doubt, your headline is the most important component of your web page. It’s the first thing your visitor will see when landing on your site. It will either compel him to continue reading, or convince him he’s at the wrong page. And the best part is, it’s super easy to test. You don’t need to get your graphic artist involved, or even your copywriter. You can easily craft a few benefits-laden headlines to test on your own. I suggest writing at least four different headlines and designing an A/B test to verify the effectiveness of each.

2. Your Opening Paragraph

Just as in offline direct mail marketing, the opening paragraph of your web page sales letter must pull the reader into your copy and make him want to read more. Because many small business owners have a harder time writing opening paragraphs than headlines, you might want to get your copywriter involved in this one. But again, a simple A/B test can be used to measure the effectiveness of each paragraph.

3. Your Call to Action

There are dozens of different ways to spell out to your reader exactly what you want him to do. And depending on your product, your niche, your audience, etc, some will definitely be more effective than others. This is one component of your web page that you don’t want to leave to chance. Rather than simply copying what other marketers are doing, choose several different calls to action and test them each against each other.

4. Your Product Benefits

Your sales copy will be most effective when you list the most important benefit first. But Wait!! Your prospect might have a different opinion of which is the most important benefit. Try varying the order of your benefit statements to test which positioning converts at the highest rate. This could also provide some valuable insight into rewriting your entire sales letter for higher conversions – or writing the sales letter for your next product.

5. Your Graphics and Visual Elements

They say a picture is worth a thousand words – but what is the wrong picture worth? Some colors, graphics and photographs can actually hurt your conversion rate. Some can provide a so-so conversion rate. While others can have your conversion rate soaring through the roof. The only way you’ll know for sure that you’re using the right visual elements is to test. A multivariate test will allow you to test several different elements simultaneously to ensure you have the right combination.

Once these initial tests are done, it will be time to move on to more tests. Never rest on your laurels and never assume that your conversion rate is as good as it could possibly be. There will always be room for improvement – and room for more testing.

FREE Website Split-Testing Schedule

If you’re new to website split testing and you’d like an easy way to get started, download my free website split testing schedule:
http://www.modernimage.com/freereports/split-test-schedule.htm

How To Optimize Your PDFs For Better Search Traffic

2009 April 6

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presented by Karen Scharf: Helping You Improve Web Conversions

My life, my love, m I recently came across a quote from a web marketer saying that people who “include PDF documents [in their websites] don’t realize the search engines cannot see this text.” Fortunately, that’s not really the case. I believe the real problem is that most people don’t take the appropriate care when creating their PDFs. In fact, PDF documents can be a great way to improve your search traffic, as long as you follow a few simple rules.

First, make sure your PDFs actually contain text. The search engines will crawl the text of a PDF just as they crawl a web page. Most graphics programs are capable of adding text to the graphics they create - but this is not actually “machine text”. If your PDF document was originally created in a graphics program, there’s a good chance that the search engines can’t read it. Stick with Word or other word processing programs for creating your original documents.

Make sure your text is optimized, just like a webpage. It needs to contain headlines and your important keywords. I haven’t figured out what the keyword density in a PDF should be yet, but I would suggest aiming for 3-6%.

Remember the crawl factor. Include links to your PDF documents from your webpages and vice versa, and use the appropriate anchor text. Depending on which version of Acrobat you’re using, there’s a good chance that the links from your Word document will NOT automatically convert into links in your PDF document. Don’t forget to use the Link tool in Acrobat to recreate your hyperlinks.

If you’re including graphics in your PDF, optimize the graphics before inserting them into the original document. This will help keep your PDF file size down - files that are too large can be abandoned by the search engines before the crawl is done.

Don’t forget to update the document properties. Often, the name you give your original document will be automatically inserted as the title in the PDF file’s properties. The PDF document properties - especially the title tag - are similar to an html document’s meta data. Something like “Report1.doc” isn’t going to help your search traffic much. After the PDF has been created, be sure to open it in Acrobat and tweak all of the properties and add the appropriate keywords.

Don’t be an early adopter. There’s no need to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Acrobat since the search engines’ capabilities often lag behind the software’s development. Just because Acrobat 8 can create 3D CAD drawings, doesn’t mean Google can read them. If you do have the newest version of Acrobat, save your document for a lesser version (5 or 6).

Optimize the final PDF file. Be sure to use the built in PDF optimizer and Optimize For The Web options. This will help keep your file size as small as possible and also allow for an interlaced display.

Time to implement: With PDF documents, it’s creating the original file that is the time consuming part. After all that work, it’s definitely work the extra 10 minutes or so to make the few necessary tweaks in Acrobat.

How To Yield a 7% Sales Increase With An Incredibly Easy Redesign

2009 April 3

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presented by Karen Scharf: Helping You Improve Web Conversions

I have some very interested split test results that I think will really surprise you. Here’s the story of a major retailer who increased sales over 7% by going against conventional wisdom.

Conventional web design tells us to minimize the number of clicks it takes for your visitor to make a purchase. So Michael was pretty satisfied with his clear, graphical web design. Upon entering the home page, the visitor was met by three big, fat, colorful “buy now” buttons - one for each product - neatly lined up next to each other. Clicking either button took the visitor directly to the check out page. There wasn’t a lot of clutter on the page, and the text was very minimal. Michael didn’t want to confuse or distract his visitors so he made it as easy as possible: one click was all it took to make a purchase.

But he noticed that lots of visitors abandoned their shopping carts after clicking the buy now button. Obviously something was wrong. Time for a split test…

The original page was kept as-is, a second page was designed as Page B and a third page as Page C.

On Page B, the buy now buttons were lined up vertically instead of horizontally and simple “more information” text links were added underneath each buy now button. Even though the products for sale were “no brainer” commodities, the suspicion was that some visitors still wanted a little more info before making a purchase.

On Page C, the buttons were replaced with text-only links, also aligned vertically, and more complex, text-heavy links were added under the buttons.

Here’s a quick idea of the basic layouts:

Page A

Page B

Page C

Now I will admit, most people who saw design C thought it would never work. It was too cluttered, there wasn’t enough white space and there were too many distractions.

Turns out they were wrong. In fact, 40% of visitors clicked the “learn more” links, and Page C resulted in a sales increase of over 7%.

I can’t exactly explain why the third design was more effective, but it’s possible that web users have simply been “trained” to scan down the page looking for text links, rather than scan across looking at graphics (think Google SERPs). And, in these days of banner blindness, maybe the colorful, glaring buy buttons were almost invisible. I can’t give you a definite answer, but what ever the reason for its success, this simple redesign is worth a try.

Time to implement: This redesign is incredibly easy since all it involves is text - no need to create any graphics at all. Redesigning the page should take less than half an hour. The time consuming part comes in creating the new product information pages to link to; but hopefully, those will already exist. And, as always, I recommend that you perform a split test before making any changes permanent. Everyone’s target market is different.