Conversion Rate & Web Optimisation Specialists - Click2Conversions

Having friends & colleagues who work across all different disciplines of online marketing and with varying clients, occasionally I get asked if it is possible to make a ‘quick start’ in Conversion Rate Optimisation. Essentially this involves cracking on with testing on important parts of the site without understanding the full scope of CRO or fully analysing their own site data.

I wouldn’t advocate making a start in CRO in this way myself as I believe that you need to fully understand the method and consequences of the method, as well as visitor behaviour on your own site, before embarking on a testing strategy. However as an exercise I’ve actually found it rather interesting, as well as quite difficult, to focus this to short achievable actions.

I thus present my 1 page CRO quick start guide, designed for those who want to test their site and spend little time or brainpower doing so. Your feedback is very much desired and appreciated:

1 Page CRO Quick Start

OK so you know what CRO is and why you should be doing it. You want to get going with it ASAP but don’t have the time/resources to spend hours analysing data & ‘expert’ CRO theories. The good news is you don’t really have to:

1. Look at your top 10 landing pages within your analytics. From these identify those with high bounce rates - they are probably not performing to their full potential

2. Look at those pages and think what could be changed to encourage visitors to move further towards a conversion. Here’s some ideas:

• Is it obvious to the visitor how they can/should interact with the page? Can you make it even more obvious?
• Is the important info where most people can see it? Check out this Google tool - http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
• Do you have too many calls to action? (Buy Now, Add to Cart, etc…) Are they grabbing the eye? Try it with only 1 in a more contrasting/vibrant colour.
• Are there lots of other links/navigation. If the landing page is focussed enough to its source you should have a good idea where the visitor wants to go so you can lose the distractions.
• Is the product and benefits clearly obvious in any imagery on the page? Try a different image.
• Have you had an ‘out there’ idea for your landing page in the past which you or someone else has vetoed? Give it a go, innovation can throw all the rules out of the window.

3. Get alternative version made up of the page (for an A/B test), or the alternative code for the page sections that you want to test (Multi-Variate Test) through your developer/designer. You may want to try a few different versions (depending on traffic - check here to see how long your test will potentially last - https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/siteopt/help/calculator.html .

4. If you don’t already have one get yourself a Google Website Optimizer (GWO) account - http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/b/index.html . Create a new test and follow the instructions for implementing it. You will almost certainly need some developer input as you go through this also, but it shouldn’t take much of their time to do what’s necessary.

5. Start the test.

6. GWO will monitor the success of your combinations and you can always view the report to see how each is performing. As a general rule if a combination turns red you should switch it off. GWO will tell you when one combination is statistically a ‘high confidence winner’ and you can then implement it on your site.

It’s not perfect and I’m sure makes some assumptions it shouldn’t, but I think it does in a very basic non-strategic way cover most of the bases. Do you agree? Is there anything that you would add?

Do let us know.