Problems in Conversion 1
How to Solve Your
Biggest Problems with
Website Conversion
BY KATHRYN ARAGON & KEVIN GAO
Problems in Conversion 2
Problems in Conversion 3
Table of Contents
Performance Tuning: 4 Things that Make or Break Usability ................................................. 11
PAGE LOADING SPEED ........................................................................................................ 12
BROWSER COMPATIBILITY .................................................................................................. 16
RESPONSIVE DESIGN ........................................................................................................... 18
LINK INTEGRITY .................................................................................................................... 20
SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................. 23
Logic and Direction: How to Turn Visitors into Customers .................................................... 24
LET’S SEE HOW THIS WORKS IN A BRICK-AND-MORTAR STORE ..................................... 26
LOGIC .................................................................................................................................... 28
DIRECTION ........................................................................................................................... 40
SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................. 45
The User Interface: Creating a Buying Environment on Your Website ................................. 47
COLOR .................................................................................................................................. 48
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CONFORMING TO VISITOR BEHAVIOR .............................................................................. 52
FLOW..................................................................................................................................... 54
PAYMENT OPTIONS ............................................................................................................. 56
SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................. 57
The Emotional Journey: Moving Customers Toward the Sale ................................................ 58
BRANDING ............................................................................................................................ 60
HONESTY .............................................................................................................................. 61
RESPECT ................................................................................................................................ 64
COMMUNITY ........................................................................................................................ 65
SECURITY .............................................................................................................................. 67
SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................. 69
An Analytic Approach: How to Find and Fix Conversion Problems ....................................... 71
THE OPTIMIZATION PROCESS ............................................................................................ 73
SPLIT TESTING ...................................................................................................................... 75
MULTIVARIATE TESTING ...................................................................................................... 77
SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................. 82
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The Bottom Line in Website Conversion .................................................................................. 83
About the Author .................................................................................................................... 85
Crazy Egg: When Analytics Aren’t Enough ............................................................................ 86
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Problems in Conversion 7
As a communication tool, the World Wide Web is as revolutionary as the invention of the
Gutenberg press back in the 15th century. The Web makes a seemingly infinite amount of
information instantly available to a majority of inhabitants of this planet. Indeed, just
about every conceivable topic has a website dedicated to it.
With such a large variation of websites available—over 861 million worldwide, according
to Netcraft—it’s easy to lose your way when creating your own website for your own
purposes.
It would seem that there are just about as many purposes to building a website as there
are websites in the world. But this is not the case. There really are only three major
purposes that websites serve:
1. provide an outlet for creative expression
2. disseminate information
3. motivate behavior
The personal website typically serves as an outlet for creative expression and doesn’t
normally seek to motivate behavior of its visitors. Business-related websites, on the other
hand, seek to disseminate information in order to motivate behavior.
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While both personal and business websites contain creative expression and are
informative, only business websites are designed to convert visitors into paying
customers. The rate at which visitors are converted into customers is known as the
“conversion rate.”
Mathematically, the conversion rate equation looks like this:
Conversion Rate = Number of visitors taking action / Number of visitors
In this context, a visitor “takes action” when he responds in some way that benefits the
business. For example, a B2B business might consider the downloading of a white paper
to be the desired action of a particular Web page. A B2C business may consider the
creation of a shopping cart to be the desired action. In all cases, one rule applies:
Every business Web page must drive some sort of action.
There are many factors that can have an adverse effect on the conversion rate. This e-
book focuses on these factors as well as some techniques for monitoring and testing
conversion rates.
Chapter 1 focuses on the mechanics of your website server and how its performance—or
lack thereof—affects your conversion rate.
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Chapter 2 looks closer at the visitor experience upon arriving at your site. It helps you
analyze whether all your products are easy to find, whether they’re grouped in a way that
makes logical sense, whether you’re taking advantage of upsell and cross-sell
opportunities and whether your visitors can find help when they need it.
Chapter 3 dives deeper into your user interface and considers whether your site’s colors
make sense, whether your site is well behaved and whether your visitors can find their
way around.
Chapter 4 considers the emotional side of business websites. Whether buying for yourself
or making a purchase on behalf of your company, the act of paying for a product or
service raises emotional awareness of risk, trust and security. Business websites ignore
these human emotions at their own risk. This article focuses on reassuring potential
customers that their concerns are being addressed.
Chapter 5 introduces the analytical side of website conversion. It looks at split and
multivariate testing, and touches upon the concepts of sample size and the art of
continuous website optimization.
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We hope you not only enjoy reading these articles, but that they provide some real
tangible benefit to your company by helping you optimize your website for increased
revenue.
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Performance Tuning
4 Things that Make or Break Usability
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Your business uses its website to generate revenue. Period. So any problems with website
performance will directly affect your website conversion.
Think for a moment about a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Visitors are willing to
tolerate minor inconveniences, like a freshly mopped floor that may be a bit slippery.
Why? Because they've taken the time to get to the store’s location and invested in the
journey to purchase.
But online visitors have not invested anything. They lose nothing by leaving, so one minor
inconvenience due to poor website performance is enough to drive them away.
Your website’s performance can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. Let’s look at
four performance issues that are critical to your success.
PAGE LOADING SPEED
Visitors are impatient. They will leave your site if the initial landing page doesn't load in a
reasonable amount of time—and the definition of “reasonable” grows shorter every day.
According to a KISSmetrics survey, you'll lose nearly 7% of your visitors for each second of
load time. Which means a four-second load time will result in a loss of nearly 25% of your
visitors!
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This news should shock you. You'll lose an opportunity to convert visitors before they've
even had a chance to get your initial sales pitch!
How do you speed up your website?
You can uncover issues with page loading time using an online profiler like Pingdom. You
don’t have to check all pages, but you should, at the very least, check the likeliest landing
pages.
Recognize that pages consist of a lot of files, such as pictures, scripts and style sheets. You
should profile the load times of each file to get hints as to where the problems may be.
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A “Waterfall” report from Pingdom, itemizing file-load timing on a web page
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Action – Before you start making any changes, establish a base line on your critical pages.
Analyze the results to see how long it takes to load different components. Focus on each
of the components to see how they can be optimized. For example:
Optimize Pictures – Render pictures to the minimum physical size needed. Just
because it's possible to have the browser render a picture at half size doesn't mean
you should. If the picture is rendered to 100 x 200 pixels, make sure the
corresponding jpeg is rendered to that size. Also, compress jpegs as much as
possible while maintaining an acceptable visual quality.
JavaScript – It's easy to be lazy and include a whole library of JavaScript functions,
even though you only use one or two functions. Reduce your JavaScript load time
by including only sub-sections of libraries wherever possible. Also make sure to use
the "min" version of scripts, if available.
CSS – Eliminate unused styles and style sheets. Your website designer may have
included some CSS libraries that are not being used. Inspect each library to see if it
really needs to be included.
After optimizing your pages, compare the results using your baseline. This will give you
direct feedback on your success.
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Tip – Every second you shave off a page’s load time represents 7% more customers!
So even if you need to pay for optimization tools, compare the 7% against the cost.
BROWSER COMPATIBILITY
Have you ever come across a website that says, "Best when viewed on Internet Explorer?"
Does a piece of you die inside when you see this? It should!
You should refuse to tolerate this in your own website design because it will cause you to
lose visitors. Even if you believe that 80–85 percent of web browsers are using IE (which is
a very dated view), you will alienate 15–20 percent of your visitors right away. Can you
afford to lose this much business?
You can use Google Analytics (or similar) to see what types of browsers are accessing your
site. Then use an online tool like Browsershots to test the level of browser compatibility.
Browsershots also lets you test across all browser revisions, so you can test compatibility
back to earlier versions of browsers.
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Snapshots of web pages under various browsers, as reported by Browsershots
Action – Identify the most popular browsers—including revisions—that are hitting your
site, and work down the list to ensure compatibility.
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Understand the financial tradeoffs involved. For example, is it worth the expense of
testing and fixing your site to run a particular version of a particular browser even though
only one percent of your customers are using that browser?
Tip – Don't implement the latest HTML technology on your site—for example, automatic
shadows in CSS3—unless you provide a graceful fallback for older browsers.
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
Does your site render on mobile and tablet devices? Does it respond to the different
screen widths so people can use it without pinch-zooming and squinting?
Responsive Design is becoming a bigger topic every day. While looking for browser
incompatibility, as described in the previous section, you may find that a significant
percent of your visitors are using mobile devices.
An excellent article in Forbes describes the urgency of implementing a responsive design.
It also highlights some good techniques for determining the number of mobile devices
accessing your site as well as a great way to spot trends in this area.
But research has already shown that consumers are using multiple devices each day to
browse the Internet. For example, a study by Monetate reveals that one-fourth of visits to
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ecommerce websites now come from a mobile device, while year-over-year PC sales are
on the decline.
The bottom line is that you ignore mobile browsers at the cost of losing visitors.
While it may cost some money to retain a website designer to implement a responsive
design, you need only look at the increasing percentage of your mobile viewers to
perform a quick cost analysis and determine the cost of not implementing a responsive
design.
As mentioned in the previous section, you can use Google Analytics (or similar) profiling
tools to determine the number of customers accessing your site on mobile devices. Then
look deeper and determine the bounce rate among visitors using mobile devices. If it's
higher than your average bounce rate, you have a problem.
Action – Make your website responsive, even if it requires a site redesign. Your server
needs to be able to detect browser screen width and serve the appropriate pages.
Is it expensive? It may be. But compare the cost of the redesign with the number of
potential visitors you will gain.
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Also, establish a baseline of mobile visitor bounce rate so that you can compare the
results after you've implemented the changes. This will help you justify the cost.
Tip – Mobile screens provide limited real estate, so focus on providing only the minimal
information to your mobile users, thereby streamlining their experience.
LINK INTEGRITY
Do you have any "404" errors on your site resulting from broken links? This type of
problem signals that you are not maintaining your site and may telegraph incompetence
to your visitors.
The bottom line is that broken links puts your credibility at risk.
There are dozens of link-checking sites online that can review your entire site and look for
links going nowhere. The W3C organization maintains a link checker that checks your site
for link problems.
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Validating links with the W3C link checker. Note the 404 error.
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Action – Navigate to a link checking site and enter your website's URL. You may have to
wait a while, but the results are worth the wait. You'll receive a comprehensive list of
broken links that you can address one at a time.
Run this test after each website update or at some periodic rate. Then make time to fix
the links.
Tip – Customize your "401" page in
case visitors see it before you can fix it.
Apologize for the inconvenience and
offer some helpful suggestions, such as
linking to a help page or a contact
form.
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SUMMARY
Your goals for your website likely include one or more of the following:
Search engine optimization
Move prospects into and through the sales funnel
Build and nurture relationship
Drive action
All of them can be affected by the issues we discussed above. Problems with website
loading speed, browser compatibility, responsive design and link integrity can drive off
visitors and lose sales.
While it's true that other issues, such as logic and flow, user interface, emotion and
feedback are important, they mean little unless the performance of the website allows a
path for visitors to convert to customers.
Stay tuned! In the next article in this series, we’ll focus on the importance of providing
logic and direction for your visitors as they work their way through your site on their path
to conversion.
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Logic and Direction
How to Turn Visitors into Customers
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People are impatient. If they don’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they’ll leave your
website.
Successful businesses understand this. They respond by doing everything in their power
to
capture people’s attention
lead them down the simplest path possible
guide them each step of the way
answer all their concerns and questions
And they keep doing those things until visitors become customers.
This is an art form that has been around for thousands of years, and it continues to work
on ecommerce websites today. To convert website visitors into website customers, you
need an action plan designed around the impatient customer.
Impatient customers appreciate two fundamental principles:
1. A logical solution that makes sense
2. A direction to follow
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In other words, guide your website visitors to a product that enhances their life, and you
will be rewarded with more customers.
CASE STUDY: A BRICK-AND-MORTAR STORE
Let’s say you and your 6-year-old son visit a bicycle shop looking for a new bike for him.
Upon entering the store, you see many racks filled with bicycles. Your first impulse is to
look for some sort of order, how the racks are organized so you can quickly find what
you’re looking for.
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You notice that all the adult bikes are in one section, grouped by the types of riders. There
are groups for mountain bikes, racing bikes and touring bikes. You look at the children’s
bikes and see girls’ bikes and boys’ bikes.
Having spotted your target area, you walk over to the boys’ bikes, but you’re not sure
which bike would be the best for your son.
Suddenly, a store clerk approaches and asks if you need assistance. You ask him a
number of questions, which are quickly answered. The clerk then interviews your son to
determine the style of bike he prefers and recommends a bike.
After you agree to buy the bike, the clerk adjusts the seat and handlebars to fit your son’s
frame, and then you’re on your way to the cash register.
Just before you reach the register, however, you stop at the bike accessories area, which is
located conveniently near the register, and add a light, a horn and some additional
reflectors to your shopping cart.
What just happened?
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The bicycle shop knew how to arrange their products so they could be easily located, they
provided assistance exactly when it was needed, and they upsold you on various
accessories.
In other words, by grouping their products in a logical way and making it easy for you
to navigate to the areas you needed, they converted you from visitor to customer.
Successful ecommerce websites do exactly the same thing, but in a virtual sense. The key
is logic and direction. Let’s talk about how you can implement these same concepts on
your website.
LOGIC
The impatient visitor demands simplicity.
Consider that there are countless different websites, each with its own way of doing
things. Yet because each website conforms to simple rules of logic, the visitor will have no
problem quickly finding her way around.
For example, an online bicycle store will look entirely different from an online skin lotion
store, but if both are organized in a way that makes sense, the visitor will have no
problem quickly finding products on either site.
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When creating a website that makes logical sense to the impatient visitor, consider the
following guidelines:
Group Your Products
Are all your products grouped in a way that makes sense? Understand how visitors form
groups in their minds. For example, a candle shop may create different groups for
scented candles, decorative candles and birthday cake candles, because this makes most
sense to customers.
Action – Create a logical tree of all product groups. (Hang on to it. You’ll need that tree
later in this article when creating your website navigation.)
Tip – Analyze your visitors’ shopping carts to gain further understanding of how they
group products. Amazon does an excellent job of this with their “Frequently Bought
Together” suggestions.
After a purchase, for examples, they additional suggestions based on the buyer’s
purchase and browsing history.
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Upsell and Cross-Sell
Many visitors approach your site because they’re looking for a solution to a problem. It’s
likely they do not know the exact solution, and they may not even know their exact
budget.
This provides you a good opportunity to solve their problem in a way that not only
increases their satisfaction but also optimizes your revenue.
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Your goal is to make sure they get the complete solution to their problem, not just a
partial solution.
Dan Kennedy does a good job of this. Once an order is complete, the confirmation page
includes a second, related offer. Like this:
Upsells are related offers that add value to the original purchase.
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Here’s another example: A hungry customer goes to McDonalds because he wants a
solution to hunger.
Maybe he’s thinking about a simple hamburger and a root beer. But when he gets into the
restaurant, he sees a delicious picture of a Big Mac, so he gets upsold to a bigger
sandwich. When he places his order, the kid behind the counter suggests purchasing an
order of french fries. The customer agrees to the cross-sell, and a purchase is made.
An upsell is a selling technique that attempts to get the customer to upgrade their
existing purchase.
A cross-sell is a selling technique that attempts to get the customer to purchase a
complimentary product in addition to the original product.
Your goal is to do one or both. Think creatively about your product line. Do you have
products that could be grouped together—one offered as an upsell after the other is
purchased?
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Action – Make a list of your major products and their potential upgrades. Also, for each
product, look for opportunities to completely satisfy the customers’ problem. For
example, suggest an extra rechargeable battery with digital camera purchases.
Tip – Not every product has an upgrade, but you probably have other opportunities to
create quantity upgrades. A 3-for-2 pricing structure, for instance.
Analyze Items Above the Fold
Pages that feature multiple products should show at least one of the products above the
fold. Impatient visitors may not know to scroll down the page and, not seeing what they
need immediately, may leave.
This can happen quite easily, even with tech-savvy visitors. Though they know they can
scroll, if they’re too busy, they may not make the time.
Be aware, as you design your pages, a users’ screen resolution can affect how much of the
page shows above the fold.
According to W3Schools, as of January 2014, approximately 15% of desktop screens show
a resolution of 1280x800 or below. This yields a maximum of 800 pixels on the vertical
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axis. If your product web pages take up 75% of that available vertical space, you’re looking
at a page fold that’s just 600 pixels into the page.
How much space does that leave for at least one product above the fold?
A lot depends on the configuration of the browser (tool ribbons and menus) as well as the
logo and header on your website. Precious little remains, so your customers could easily
lose sight of items unless he knows to scroll down.
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Action – Analyze your major product pages in light of a page fold that’s just 600 pixels
down from the top of the browser. Does a product picture and description appear above
this line?
Tip – Reduce the size of your company logo and header on pages that list products.
Busy Busy!
Impatient visitors have impatient eyes, and impatient eyes get lost if the page is too busy.
It’s tempting to cram as much information into your web pages as possible, but be careful
not to overwhelm your visitors with messaging. Often, they just want a simple solution to
their problem.
There’s an old sales lesson that goes something like this: If someone comes to your
hardware store looking for a hammer, put a hammer in his hand, take his money and
send him on his way. If you try to sell him on the benefits of the hammer and what a great
deal he is getting, he may change his mind.
In other words, once a visitor has expressed interest in a specific product, the deal is
yours to lose.
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That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to upsell and cross-sell your customers, because you
should. Just make sure that your attempts to increase revenue don’t trip him as he tries to
make his way to the cash register.
Here’s a great example of what NOT to do:
An ecommerce site that is too busy for impatient eyes!
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Assuming you were interested in purchasing an Exuviance product, you have to figure out
that the list of products is below the fold, which isn’t immediately obvious.
In the meantime, you’re bombarded by messages, many of which practically beg you to
click elsewhere, including:
25% off on orders over $60 (mentioned 5 times)
Free shipping on orders over $49 (mentioned 2 times)
“Valentine’s deals” button
“Something new that just arrived” button
“Special offer while supplies last” button
“Top 10 Shopper’s Choice” button
Don’t distract your customer with competing messages, especially on a product page.
You’re more likely to lose the sale than increase it.
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Action – Use Google Analytics (or similar) to see how often visitors land on a product page
but don’t actually put the product in their cart. Visitors may be getting distracted at this
critical stage of conversion.
Tip – Ensure every page has a shopping cart button that allows customers to complete the
sale as soon as they’re ready. Don’t get in their way!
Help
Provide help to your visitors if they appear to be stuck. Visitors who stay on the same
page for a time might be searching for an answer.
Consider incorporating a live chat or similar service on your site to help visitors get un-
stuck. It can be unobtrusive in the bottom corner of your
Web page:
Then when clicked, it opens to provide a dialog box.
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Action – Track the top exit pages using Google Analytics (or similar). Visitors that exit your
site from a product page may not have found the information they were looking for.
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Target these pages when incorporating a live chat service and see if some strategic
intervention from a proactive chat agent helps convert these visitors into customers.
Tip – Take advantage of free trials that many live chat services provide for a limited time.
DIRECTION
While people spend countless hours working on puzzles and playing strategy games, they
have no patience with websites that demand a similar level of effort. Visitors want to be
led through an ecommerce site in much the same way that they work their way through a
brick-and-mortar store.
Take a moment and think about your most recent trip to the grocery store. You arrive
with a list in-hand, and you walk through the aisles picking up items on the list.
The aisles are clearly marked according to groups of items within. There’s the bakery aisle,
for example, where you find bread, bagels and croissants. The pasta aisle contains
spaghetti, macaroni and all other forms of Italian noodles.
You get the picture. The products are grouped in a way that allows you to quickly navigate
through the store and select the items you want.
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When charting a direction for your website visitors, you need to provide this same type of
direction. Consider the following:
Heat Map
The upper left corner of your website is known as the “Golden Triangle.” This is where
most visitors initially set their attention. Visitors expect to see the most relevant
information here.
Place your website navigation in this area.
Typical heat map, showing
the most active areas in red.
Notice the triangular shape
of the most active areas,
creating the “Golden
Triangle.”
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Action – Use a service like Crazy Egg to generate a heat map based on visitor mouse
movements and clicks on your site. This can give you insight into where they might be
getting lost.
Tip – The location of the golden triangle will be in the upper right side of the browser
window for RTL (Right-to-Left) languages.
Navigation
Visitors with a clear idea of the product they’re looking for should be able to navigate your
site, clicking on a maximum of three navigational buttons before arriving at a page
featuring the product they seek.
Furthermore, each page should provide some indication of the navigational structure
above it.
Breadcrumbs are typically used for this purpose—they leave a backwards trail all the way
back to the home page and gives a “You Are Here” sense of location, just like a directory
sign in a large shopping mall.
But logically organized, intuitive navigation can also do the trick. This screenshot shows a
two-level navigation that works well:
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Action – Earlier in this article you were asked to create a logical tree of all your product
groups. Take a look at the tree and ensure that visitors can get to any page without taking
more than three steps. Use the tree to create the navigation structure.
Tip – Nested drop-down menus are losing popularity, probably because it’s difficult to use
them on a mobile device.
Solution Pages
Visitors may not be able to verbalize what they’re looking for. They may instead look for
pages that focus on solutions rather than products.
Though this mostly applies to B2B businesses, B2C websites can make use of solution
pages as well.
For example, Lowes features a section on their main menu entitled “Ideas & How-Tos”
that are split into two main groups: “Home Areas” and “Activity Types.”
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These are wonderful pages to read when you’re just looking for ideas. Eventually you’ll
focus on a product, but you need to understand the solution first.
You can quickly navigate to the solution pages on the Lowes website and get great ideas, all of
which use products from Lowes
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Action – Do some self-analysis on your business. Why do visitors come to your site? What
types of problems are they facing? Do you have products that could be positioned as
solutions?
Though this may sound trite and obvious, it’s sad that many websites don’t do this. They
focus instead on their products.
Of course, a lot depends on the product. If you’re selling tires, for example, visitors are
already very familiar with the solution to their problem. But if you’re selling lawn-care
products, you might consider the types of lawn-care problems your visitors are
experiencing before leading them to your products.
Tip – Use customer feedback forms to get insight into their problems and subsequent
solutions.
SUMMARY
If your website structure makes sense and your visitors have a clear path to the items
they seek, you can experience a high conversion rate. But if it’s confusing or makes people
think too hard, you’re leaving money on the table.
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As you saw in this chapter, a logical, easy-to-navigate website is critical to conversion.
Next, we will focus on the user interface. We’ll study how color, flow and website behavior
can also affect visitor behavior.
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The User Interface
Creating a Buying Environment
on Your Website
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Website designers often overlook the importance of providing a pleasant environment for
their visitors. They tend to take a best guess at what visitors want, and then guess again if
too many visitors click away.
It could be argued that if designers guess often enough, they’ll eventually get it right;
however, each wrong guess creates casualties on the road to profitable website
conversion.
It’s far better to start out with some good ideas in the beginning.
This article discusses four important topics to consider when optimizing the environment
your website provides for its visitors. Think of it as a facelift for your online store, which
can turn your website into a buying environment.
COLOR
Color may not be the first thing you think about when it comes to conversion
optimization. But there’s no denying its impact on the mood, or environment, of your
website.
There is an excellent article regarding color psychology on the Help Scout blog entitled,
“The Psychology of Color in Marketing and Branding.” The article points out that there are
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many factors that influence individual color preferences, including past experience,
cultural differences and home life.
Each person has a unique experience in life, and therefore no two individuals will select
the same palette of favorite colors; however, there is widespread agreement on the
appropriateness of certain colors.
For example, environmental concepts would be expressed in green—the color of healthy
plant life. Rugged concepts would use dark browns—the color of the earth.
Now take a close look at your own website. What colors are predominant on your site? Do
they flow together? Are important areas using the right colors?
Rather than attempting to use everyone’s favorite colors—which is impossible—your
website should use colors to convey a personality. If you were selling Harley Davidson
motorcycles, for example, you would use rugged dark brown colors. If a financial site,
green.
Also, consider that colors have relationships with each other. These relationships can
either be “analogous” or “triadic.” Analogous colors complement each other, while triadic
colors contrast with each other.
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Source
When building your website’s messages, you’ll want to stick with complementary colors, or
colors that are opposite one another on the color wheel.
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When highlighting the call-to-action areas, you’ll want to use triadic colors (see the image
above) so that visitors can easily locate them.
This doesn’t limit your color scheme. It simply gives you guidance when selecting colors
for individual elements on your website. For example, if brown is your main color:
A palette of analogous colors A palette of triadic colors
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Action – Take an inventory of your current web colors and how they’re used. Are
analogous colors being used to enhance your messages? Are triadic colors being used to
highlight your call-to-action links?
Tip – Use the color wizard at the Colors on the Web site to calculate triadic and analogous
colors.
CONFORMING TO VISITOR BEHAVIOR
When you break some subtle design rules, you may encourage your visitors to leave.
These rules include:
Never automatically play any sound. Never. People often surf the web at work
and won’t appreciate sudden loud music booming out their speakers.
Limit the use of pop-ups. Visitors don’t appreciate the interruption and often don’t
trust them. Note that there is a tendency lately to use windows that gently slide-in
from the side or bottom. These are perceived as being more acceptable, as they
provide service when needed. Visitors can slide them out of the way when they’re
not needed and slide them back into the window when needed.
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The browser’s cursor should change to a pointer when hovering over a link.
The cursor normally does this automatically, but if the link is implemented in
JavaScript, you’ll have to change the cursor manually. People won’t click on a link
unless they know it’s a link.
Get to the message. Each page should have a clear message—including the home
page—but too many banners and moving parts can overshadow it. Visitors will
conclude that they’ve stepped into a mess and will quickly leave.
Conform to the natural flow of reading. People who read text left-to-right (LTR)
will scan a page left-to-right as they work their way top-to-bottom. Make sure your
message flows in the same direction. If there is a call-to-action button, place it on
the right, toward the bottom of the section. The opposite polarity should be used
for right-to-left (RTL) web pages.
Action – Audit random pages on your site and ask yourself what a customer would do on
each page. Does it flow properly (LTR vs RTL)? Is the navigation menu clearly visible on
each page? Does each page convey an unambiguous message?
Tip – Use Google Analytics (or similar) to compile a list of “Top Exit Pages.” Then analyze
these pages to see what might be driving visitors away.
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FLOW
Visitors should never question what is happening or lose their way through your site. If
they lose their way, they’ll simply leave. And they may leave just before converting to a
customer.
Sometimes this happens when visitors add an item to a shopping cart.
The shopping cart page suddenly appears, where visitors can select the quantity as well as
check on the price. But if you don’t provide a way back to the exact same page (and
position) where the item was initially selected, your visitors may get lost and abandon the
cart.
Issues with flow can also occur when you provide a link on a product page. A visitor clicks
on a link in your product page to get more information; however, by doing so, he loses his
place on your product page.
Alternatively, by moving visitors off your site, you break the flow, requiring your visitors to
navigate back to your product page. Many visitors will not bother returning.
You can address this problem in two ways:
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Use target=”_blank” modification to your link
tags, so the information page opens in
another window.
Implement a “tooltip” menu in JavaScript.
At right is a tooltip example from the jquerytools
website
Action—Use Google Analytics (or similar) and make note of breaks in the visitors’ trek
through your website. The list of top exit pages may provide key insight to where the flow
is getting broken. Ideally, your top exit page would be an order confirmation page.
Tip—Joseph Kerschbaum wrote a good introduction to this on the Search Engine Watch
website entitled, “How to Use Google Analytics Visitors Flow Reports to Improve
Conversion Rates.”
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PAYMENT OPTIONS
Not every customer carries a Visa or Master Card. If you only accept one type of card, you
may lose a large percentage of customers for the lack of a payment option.
You may see a high cart-abandonment rate if customers, after filling their carts with
products to purchase, learn that you don’t accept their preferred credit cards.
Action – At the very least, ensure you accept Visa, Master Card and Discover. If a large
percent of your visitors consist of business customers, ensure you accept American
Express.
Finally, make sure you accept PayPal.
PayPal is very popular, and it allows direct
payment through their system rather than
using credit cards.
Tip – Consider putting credit card logos on
your front page, telling your visitors what
card types you accept before they invest
time on your site.
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SUMMARY
Environmental factors cannot be ignored when optimizing your website’s user interface
for conversion. Visitors demand simplicity and convenience. And if you don’t provide it,
they’ll happily buy from your competitors.
Key elements include your selection of color, the overall organization of your site, sensible
placement of elements, conforming to typical user behavior and convenience of payment.
What would you add?
Stay tuned for the fourth critical element of conversion rate optimization. Next up: how
visitors’ emotions must be taken into consideration during the conversion process.
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The Emotional Journey
Moving Customers Toward the Sale
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Emotion is messy, contradictory… and true. ~Nigella Lawson
Merchants long ago realized that the act of purchasing is an emotional experience. The
emotional level rises throughout the shopping process, hitting a peak as money changes
hands.
Why? It boils down to two things: desire and risk.
In their book, Rethinking the Sales Cycle, John Holland and Tim Young describe how the
awareness of risk continues to rise throughout a customer’s buying experience.
If you think about it, it’s a natural human reaction as the moment of commitment draws
near. It essentially asks whether the right decision is being made and whether the buyer
can live with the results.
Successful ecommerce websites address this emotional journey. And so should you.
As you lead visitors down the path of conversion, you need to provide emotional support
at each step. And to do it, you’ll need to incorporate the five concepts highlighted below.
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BRANDING
What’s in a brand? Everything! A company’s brand is the symbol of its sacred promise to
its customers. It’s a promise of continued value and security.
Companies work hard to deliver on the promise symbolized by their brand. In fact, many
companies consider their brands as bankable assets.
For example, when Hostess filed for bankruptcy in 2012, it still had a lot of equity in its
brands. Apollo Global Management purchased Twinkies and other famous Hostess snack
cake brands for $410 million.
There was literally nothing tangible
in this purchase—it was all branding.
But Apollo now owns the hearts of
loyal Twinkie lovers.
The Hostess brand was so valuable,
people missed it when it disappeared.
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Though your website may operate on a smaller scale, its brand is every bit as important as
it is to big companies, and you should, therefore, consider it a bankable asset whose value
can increase over time. As people begin to understand your company and trust it, your
brand will increase in value.
Your brand, as symbolized by its logo, will provide a recognizable sense of value and
security to your visitors. Over time, your customers will develop an emotional attachment
to it—and their loyalty will result in sales you can bank on.
Action – Ensure your logo appears on every page of your website. Consider reinforcing
that logo on your home page with a one-sentence testimonial from one of your
customers.
Tip – People generally will not look at a stand-alone testimonial page; however, you can
still feature testimonials by sprinkling them in the margins of your pages.
HONESTY
Honesty in business dealings is not only a part of your brand, it’s a concept you must
prove daily within the structure of your website.
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For example, offer full disclosure before a purchase:
Provide shipping and handling costs up-front,
before asking for your visitor’s credit card.
Indicate out-of-stock information before the
visitor puts the item in his cart.
Provide shipping information as soon as the
item ships.
Amazon is a master at this.
Notice the alert that only 18 are left in stock,
highlighted in green so it stands out. Just below that
is the reassuring, “ships from and sold by
Amazon.com” message. Additionally, shipping
information is presented here, before you add the
product to the cart.
This type of full disclosure is one way to increase trust. Another is customer support.
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Use your website to allow your customers to login and track their grievances online and
receive status updates. Believe it or not, many of these customers can be turned into
advocates for your company. As you close each support issue, ask customers to rate their
satisfaction, and if they’re very satisfied, ask them for a testimonial.
Many companies use a star rating system to allow their customers to express their level of
satisfaction with a product or service.
Do not alter this information as you tally up the score. Present an honest sense of
feedback to new prospective customers. Maybe you don’t always get a five-star rating, but
the sense of trust and honesty you convey through a transparent presentation of your
true rating will make up for the difference.
Action – Turn your website into a trust-machine. Tie your website database to the
shipping department to provide updates on shipped products. Also tie your website
database to the support department to publicly show how well you’re being perceived by
other customers.
Tip – When an embarrassing issue arises, don’t attempt to cover it up by denying its
existence. People are far more willing to forgive a mistake when followed by a genuine
confession. Not so much when it’s denied.
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RESPECT
Visitors to your website have already given you the gift of their precious time, so your site
should respect that gift by making the most of it.
For example, don’t ask for superfluous information before allowing visitors to join your
mailing list, download a white paper or purchase your products. You should collect only
the minimal information necessary. Some
sites actually demand that you sign up and
create an account before purchasing their
products! Is this really necessary?
If visitors sense that you do not respect their
precious time, they will find some other
ecommerce site that will.
Do you REALLY need all this information just so
your visitor can download a white paper?
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Action – Use Google Analytics (or similar) to see how many visitors leave your site after
being asked to fill out a form. Experiment with forms that require less information and
compare the resulting abandonment rate. (You can use split-testing for this purpose.)
Tip – Visitors generally understand why you want their information, so don’t try to
window-dress it as anything other than a sales tool.
COMMUNITY
People have a strong tendency to follow the crowd. Each sale on your site increases the
size of the buying crowd. Make good use of this crowd by providing a way for them to
interact with your company and each other.
For example, provide a five-star rating mechanism on each of your products. Allow visitors
to sort your products on popularity.
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Note the 5-Star rating and in-stock information
within the order page from Yankee Candle
Additionally, you can provide a forum for users to interact and help each other or address
questions directly to your company. Often by interacting with each other, they will
encourage one other, making company input to every problem less necessary.
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Action – Audit your site and make a list of ways in which your customers can interact and
provide feedback to your company as well as with each other.
Tip – A site forum provides a great way for your customers to interact with your company
as well as with each other; however, it can also require a lot of time and resources. Staff
your forum with qualified support personnel to respond to questions and issues within 24
hours.
SECURITY
Ecommerce websites must provide their visitors with a strong sense of security.
In light of recent events regarding stolen credit cards at major retailers, people are
understandably concerned about their credit cards. Using a reputable online merchant
credit card system like PayPal or Authorize.net can calm these concerns.
Security is an area where you may not want to go with the lowest bidder. Screen potential
merchant credit card vendors to ensure they have a recognizable brand and can provide
protection when (not if) problems occur.
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Once you find a trustworthy vendor, display their security logos prominently on your site,
particularly on the shopping cart pages. For added trust, create a privacy policy page and
ensure visitors have easy access to it. (Ask your lawyer to help draft your privacy policy.)
Secure and implement a certificate for SSL/TLS connections. Customers should never
send their credit card information “in the clear.” They may not be savvy enough to know
the difference between SSL/TLS and “clear text,” but you must!
Create security logs and review them often. Look for potential security
breaches. Expect attempted break-ins. (They happen several times an
hour, on average.)
Finally, ensure all your website software is patched to the latest build
and has incorporated all security updates. Retain the services of a
reputable security auditing company and have them evaluate your
network and policies.
Put security logos and badges on display to
reassure visitors that all purchases are secure.
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Action – Audit your shopping cart page to ensure it has the merchant security logo
prominently displayed. Periodically review your privacy policy page with your lawyer to
ensure it remains valid in the face of a continually changing security environment. Retain
a professional security auditor to help keep constant watch for security vulnerabilities.
Tip – Security breaches are typically due to human complacency, not a failure of
equipment or security policies.
SUMMARY
Purchasing any product, online or in person, is an emotional experience. As the time of
purchase draws near, customers develop an increasing sense of risk. To improve your
conversion rate, you must understand this sense of risk. Remember, it’s a natural human
emotion that must be addressed.
Before customers can feel comfortable making a purchase from you online, they must
first trust you. You can reassure them by addressing five important areas: branding,
honesty, respect, community and security.
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Only by incorporating these elements will you experience high satisfaction and optimal
conversion.
Next up, an analytical approach to conversion optimization that depends on split and
multivariate testing. Let’s take a look.
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An Analytic Approach
How to Find and Fix Conversion Problems
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Your business website’s main objective is to get visitors to take some sort of action, such
as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product. This is called a conversion.
Ultimately, conversions drive your business, which means you can optimize your business
by optimizing your conversions.
So what do you do when conversions are low?
Hopefully you’ve been implementing the tips in this guide. You’ve already learned tips for
improving usability, logic, emotional engagement, and more. It’s time now to focus on the
process of optimizing your website for conversion.
I’m coming from one perspective. If you’re reading this article, you:
already have an attractive website and are getting a decent amount of traffic
suspect your conversion rate can be improved
are willing to confirm your suspicion through experimentation
Keep reading, and I’ll tell you how it’s done.
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THE OPTIMIZATION PROCESS
To optimize anything, you need to conduct a scientific experiment, carefully analyze the
results, select the optimal result, and repeat. If everything is done correctly, the results get
better and better over time.
This concept applies very nicely to website design.
A good website design is one that delivers consistently high conversion rates. But even the
best websites can increase conversions. You simply need to know how.
The key is to avoid arbitrary decisions. For example, let’s say you need to choose between
two different photos as part of a car advertisement.
One photo features an attractive woman leaning against the driver’s door with a beach in
the background. The other photo features a similarly attractive woman in a similar pose
within a country setting.
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Which photo will generate the most conversions?
Either photo would probably work well, but which one works best? Without
experimentation, the decision seems arbitrary. But with experimentation, you can test
both photos and then select the one that provides the higher conversion rate.
Action – Meet with your web designer and create a short list of isolated decisions that can
be tested. For example, does the “Call to Action” button work best along the right margin
or the left margin? And should it be yellow or red?
Tip – There’s a good chance that your web team already has a list of hotly debated design
issues. This is a good starting point for running your “split” and “multivariate” tests, as
described in the next sections.
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SPLIT TESTING
Also known as A/B testing, split testing seeks to optimize results when trying to decide
between two isolated parameters. The example above, with two photos, demonstrates
this concept—you must choose between one of two photos.
Here’s how the split test works:
1. Decide what constitutes a “conversion.” You may decide that a conversion is simply
a click on a button to get more information, the downloading of some content, or
placing an item in a shopping cart.
2. Determine the sample size. In other words, decide the number of visitors needed
for your experiment. The larger the sample size, the more accurate your results will
become.
3. Create a separate Web page for each of the two variations. Implement special code
on each page so that the corresponding conversions can be separately tracked.
Note that you must keep track of which page is your “primary” page, so after the
sample size has been exhausted (the experiment has run its course), the website
will fall back to the primary page.
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4. Upload both pages to your site.
5. Implement special code so that each visitor sees only one of the two pages. Use a
cookie to ensure that each visitor sees the same page each time he visits your site.
6. Track the total number of visitors to the pages, along with the number of
conversions that occurred for each.
7. Ensure the server falls back to the “primary” page after the sample size has been
exhausted. At that point, stop taking data.
After running the above experiment, you analyze the results. If it appears that one choice
is clearly better than the other, you should change the “primary” page accordingly,
thereby optimizing your site for conversion.
For example, the photo ads above yield the following conversion rates:
Page Name Conversion Rate
Beach Background 2.34% +/- 0.23%
Country Background 1.92% +/- 0.14%
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The beach photo is the winner, as it shows the higher conversion rate, even after
accounting for the +/- variation. The website should thus be changed to implement the
beach photo.
Action – Review the list of isolated decisions created in the previous section and look for
decisions where there can only be one of two outcomes. Prioritize this list based on the
highest possible conversion rate. Start working through the list, one at a time, using the
experimental process highlighted above.
Tip – Pay attention to the “confidence interval.” This number indicates the variation in
your results that must be taken into account. Generally, the variation gets smaller as your
sample size gets larger.
MULTIVARIATE TESTING
The concept of multivariate testing is similar to split testing, with the exception that it
compares multiple pages against each other. Multivariate testing thus allows you to
address issues in scope, rather than simple binary decisions.
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For example, as winter approaches, you may want to incorporate a winter theme on your
site. Should you implement something minimal like hanging an icicle from your logo? Or
should you go further and simulate snowflakes dropping across your entire page along
with the icicle?
Your marketing team may come up with dozens of creative ideas. You collect the ideas
into groups and create pages based on the groups. Essentially, you’re testing groups of
multiple changes on a page.
The step-by-step experimentation process is similar to split testing, except you’re loading
multiple pages into the test, rather than just two.
Be aware, the code for multivariate testing is a bit more complicated because you are now
splitting each of your visitors into one of many pages and keeping track of conversion
rates on each page.
Also, keep in mind that the original page must be part of the test. It is the baseline that is
used to compare the conversion rates.
When the experiment has concluded, you may end up with something that looks like this:
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Page
Name
Conversion Rate Improved Conversions
/Visitors
Original 6.20% +/- 3.5% – 22/355
Group 1 7.20% +/- 3.6% 16.13% 25/347
Group 2 6.40% +/- 3.3% 3.22% 22/344
Group 3 8.01% +/- 3.2% 29.19% 29/360
Group 4 5.23% +/- 3.6% -15.64% 18/344
Group 5 6.55% +/- 3.5% 5.65% 23/351
At first glance, it looks like the Group 3 page, with 29.19% improvement, produced the
best conversion rate. But it’s important to exercise caution. The variance (the +/- after the
conversion rate) is still quite wide.
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The original page expressed a conversion of 6.20% plus or minus 3.5%. Despite the fact
that Group 3 looks vastly superior, the conversion rate variance from both the original
page and Group 3 overlap.
Let’s put that into a chart, and you can see what I mean:
Original Page: 6.20 – 3.5 = 2.7 or 6.20 + 3.5 = 9.70
Group 3 Page: 8.01 – 3.2 = 4.81 or 8.01 + 3.2 = 11.21
The two bars overlap, which means you don’t have enough statistical confidence that
Group 3 is indeed better than the original.
The advice here would be to increase the sample size to decrease the variance, and
therefore determine whether the changes in Group 3 really are superior.
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After testing all the groups and establishing conversion rates that differ by more than
their tolerance levels, you would simply implement the page design with the highest
conversion rate. You could then create more groups and repeat the experiment.
Action – Review the list of isolated decisions created in the first section of this article and
look for decisions where there are many possible changes. These types of changes
generally pertain to the scope of the page (e.g., the template) rather than simple isolated
“this-or-that” decisions.
Start working through the list and create a set of changed pages for each. Then load these
pages into the system, using the experimental process similar to the description for split
testing.
Tip – You want good confidence intervals, so you’ll have to take a lot of samples; however,
you will want to limit the number of experiments to keep from confusing your visitors.
Therefore, consider selecting only a small percent of your visitors, say 10%, and
experiment on them.
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SUMMARY
There are a lot of factors that affect website conversion, and it can be difficult to decide
which are superior. You can use split testing to choose between two isolated parameters.
And you can use multivariate testing to decide between groups of parameters.
In either case, you conduct a scientific experiment on your website visitors to determine
which changes yield superior conversion rates.
As a result, your decisions are never based on personal preference or the opinions of
people inside your organization. By testing your options, you let visitors tell you which
page elements are most persuasive.
In this case, the customer is always right.
Photo Credits: Ivan Mikhaylov, Vladimir Voronin
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The Bottom Line in Website Conversion
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The articles in this e-book serve as an introduction to website conversion. We began with
a quick definition of conversion, and then, through a series of topics, each critical to a
well-optimized website:
1. Tuning your web server for optimal visitor experience
2. Paying attention to the concepts of logic and design
3. Factoring your user interface into your website design
4. Carefully considering emotional factors
5. Continuously analyzing and optimizing each page
Unlike personal websites, business websites seek to continuously optimize for revenue,
and revenue can only occur when visitors convert into paying customers.
We hope you enjoyed reading this e-book and that you can use the information to
immediately take action to optimize your website and, ultimately, your revenue.
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About the Authors
Kevin Gao is the founder and CEO of Comm100, a leading
provider of live chat software for business. As a software
developer as well as a small business expert, he’s always
ambitious to revolutionize the way of online customer
service and communication.
Find Kevin on Twitter.
Kathryn Aragon is an award-winning copywriter and
marketer, and editor of The Daily Egg. Her chief goal is to
help businesses communicate, connect, convert… and
capture their market.
Connect with Kathryn on Twitter and Google+.
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Crazy Egg: When Analytics Aren’t Enough
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A Crazy Egg heatmap lets you collect more than 88% of the data you would using a traditional eye-
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