Web Page Testing for Better Conversion Rates

There are many ways and many reasons to conduct web page testing, but the ones this article will focus on are the ones that directly relate to closing the sale. We’re talking about the pages that require your perspective customer to take you up on your offer, or “x” out. You want those pages to encourage your visitors to say “sign me up” or “how do I order?” A great way to make sure they do that is conduct web page testing by split testing

Although there are many web pages that can benefit from split testing, for the purpose of explanation and example, we will primarily look at landing pages, those pages where your visitor arrives after being so directed from an ad or email link. There are many parts of a landing page that can effect your conversion rates, and many that do not, but those elements are not always the same among sites or among visitors. If you think it might have some effect, you need to test if, even if you think it doesn’t you might want to test it anyway just in case. Nothing is a silly idea when it comes to web page testing.

The concept is that you decide what you want to test, say the background color. Then you  choose two colors to test, and create two landing pages, identical in every way but the back ground color. You tell your sever how to alternate the pages between visitors, and the page with the better conversion rate wins. That, in a nut shell, is how to conduct web page testing using the A/B split test method.

As you might imagine web page testing using that method might take a great deal of time, so there are other methods that allow you to test more than two variations of one element. Multivariate testing allows for the testing of many versions of many elements at the same time, using mathematical calculations.

Either way, there are great advantages relating to web page testing in this manner. One is that split testing lets the customer tell you what is working and what isn’t , but their actions. Better pages mean that visitors are going to stay longer, increasing the likelihood of a sale. Better landing pages, mean that the visitor coming from an ad that is costing you by the click is more likely to make a purchase, thereby increasing your return on investment.

While it is entire possible to design and conduct your own web page testing, particularly if you wrote your own scripts for your site, most of us can benefit from the use of a split testing tool. The web is full of them, from the free to the expensive. One free tool is the Google Website Optimizer. It will let you conduct both A/B and multivariate testing. However it is not the only tool and you need to check them all out and decide what tool, if any would be most beneficial to your own web page testing.

Tagged as: Split Test Landing Pages, Web Page Split Testing