How We Improved Conversions By 266%

August 6, 2014

Internet Marketing Testing

Today’s modern day internet marketer is a scientist testing different versions of pages and doing whatever it takes to get better data. We never rest on “good is good enough.” We constantly look to improve any core metric we can.

There are a number of tools to help the modern day internet marketer succeed. One of the best internet marketing tools used for A/B testing and experimenting is Optimizely.

Optimizely gives you the ability to take data you already have and use it to improve your site. For example, below we can see that almost one-third of the traffic for this particular site is between 18-24 and 25-34, but those customers are the lowest revenue generators for the site. 

 

Looking at this data we can see that younger age groups are interested in this site, but they aren’t moving down the funnel and converting. We’re seeing that there must be something that could be improved because almost one third of the largest demographic is leaving the site after only seeing the homepage.

 

 

To test our theory we used Optimizely to give our site a small 2014 facelift. We updated the main banner image to better target our demographic. We used an image of a young man 20-25 versus the original picture of a man 35+. We also focused on the current season and created a larger red CTA button. As well as updated the secondary CTA buttons making them much more visually based with images of the actual products for sale rather than plain text.

Once we had both versions set, we began to gather the greatly improved data. Optimizely gives you integrated tools and custom reports in order to really tell what parts of your design are having an impact.  

 

Optimizely is also great for goal creation:

Clicks

One goal type is based on elements within a certain page. In this case, we’ve used clickable goals to show the difference in performance between the original CTAs VS. the new versions. These goals are quick and easy to implement.

Pageview

These goals are counted as a completion based upon visitors reaching a specific page. Goals such as these are great for testing different variations of pages to see how they affect conversions/goals. By setting your www.company.com/thankyou as your pageview goal, it allows you to track which version has more people actually completing a goal.

Custom Events

At times, there are certain ideas you want to test, like video plays, coupon use, or e-book downloads that aren’t as easily tracked. Using the code below gives you the ability track custom goals on the page when using Optimizely.

var trackCustomEvent = function(

) { window[‘optimizely’] = window[‘optimizely’] || [];

window.optimizely.push([“trackEvent”, “eventName”]); }

 

Our experiments were set out to test the interaction on the homepage banner and sub CTAs. From the data we’ve collected so far, we can see that the new banner is doing better. There’s a 56% improvement in engagement over the original version, and an amazing 266% improvement over the sub CTAs. We can now clearly see the new version is making a big difference.

 

 

Most importantly, we can see a 31% increase in conversions in our experiment. With all of the data and experimentation, we can tell that the website updates are better at moving customers down the funnel. 

 

Demographic data showed a gap in strategy. There was a large portion of traffic leaving the site without taking any action or buying. Testing tools gave us the ability to test our hypothesis based on the data, and we know from the results that we were correct.

The saying goes “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” But, as internet marketers we have to ask “Why not?” Here at ProspectMX, we don’t believe in just letting a good thing stay the way it is. We want to be constantly improving, and we want that same thing for our clients as well. Our theories and experiments are used as a means to do more for our clients, and to improve their traffic, conversions, and revenue gain, but we won’t stop there. Nothing gets better by staying the same.

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