Surprisingly even the largest e-commerce companies that have resources, expensive tools, and a high volume of web traffic are still running only A-B tests. When asked why, they will tell you about reasons that reveal a false understanding of what A-B Split testing can do for them.

Industry experts, analysts, and bloggers are not helping either. Often you can hear them talking about A-B and Multivariate testing in the same breath like they are talking about the same thing.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

Here is our attempt to dispel the most widespread myths and to articulate the difference between A-B split and Multivariate Testing (MVT) methods.

Myth #1 – A-B split testing is less risky

Myth #2 – A-B split testing is great for quick learning

Myth #3 – A-B split testing is best for a new designs or big changes

Myth #4 – A-B split testing is the best for big increases in conversion rate

Myth #5 – A-B split testing is much simpler to setup

Myth #6 – A-B split testing is less costly

Myth #7 – A-B split testing is the best for small to medium companies or for ‘long tail’ web pages at the big e-commerce sites

With more complex algorithms that factor in local, personal and universal search features, search rankings are not always consistent. Today’s results often depend on a user’s location, their search history and their behavior with the search results – sometimes you can see different search results for the same search terms, even on two different computers in the same location.

One question many businesses have when hunting for a search engine optimization (SEO) company is, “Will this company know us and our audience well enough to turn our web business into something profitable, worthy of our investment?” Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discern the answer before you are three months into an agreement.

Web Traffic vs. Engagement

Is the goal of SEO to get as much traffic as possible to a website? Many SEO companies will lead you to believe that more traffic is all there is to it. Granted, getting more traffic is a part of it, but more eyeballs on a web page do not necessarily mean achieving your business goals.

Look at your web analytics – specifically the keywords that brought in the majority of traffic – then evaluate the quality of this traffic over the past month or quarter. A high bounce rate and low average time on site for visits from a particular keyword can indicate one or all of these:

Let me suggest that the focus of SEO should be audience engagement, rather than traffic. According to Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, “Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” That’s pretty clear: Without specific goals, driving more traffic to your website sounds like a good option.

But if a visitor hits your site and bounces, your depth of visitor interaction is null. To truly engage a visitor requires relevance and targeted communication. So what is best for your business? I offer a different approach: using SEO to build audience engagement.

“But,” you ask, “what does that have to do with SEO?” Everything, if you want long-term customer loyalty rather than more, sort-of-qualified traffic. Loyalty is a measurable metric and often comes with SEO rewards like fabulous testimonials and links from customer sites.

At the end of the day, businesses want SEO consultants who tailor their Internet marketing directly to the bottom line by bringing valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and returning customers – rather than simply getting more traffic to the site.

About the Author

Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, founded in 2000 to provide tailored Internet marketing plans – valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and loyal customers.

Up to very recently, conversion rate optimization (CRO) was dominated by consultants who were providing the optimization solutions as a blend of empirical experience with a little bit of technology. The practitioners were relying more on the art of persuasive copy writing and the best design practices, and less on the technology and scientific methods. The advent of new multivariate testing technologies, adaptive multivariate testing in particular, is significantly impacting the industry’s best practices. Although they are still important and relevant, they are no longer dominant. Using traditional best practices is a great way to initialize the CRO journey but they are by no means the final destination.

New optimization technology is consistently revealing that what works for one company may not work for another. Even more subtle, two vendors selling the exactly the same type product, optimizing the very same type of web page elements, using the same marketing ideas, might get significantly different outcomes.

That is why three simple rules below are so important for opening doors for the use of technology and creating much higher value with the conversion rate optimization.

A: Maximize the performance of existing web pages before considering a new design

One of the biggest misconceptions in conversion rate optimization business is thinking that the only way that you can get higher page conversion rates is to completely re-design your web page or a complete website. This immediately sounds like a complicated and expensive endeavor that turns off the great majority e-merchants. They think: Not now. We have no time, money, or resources to do it.

The multivariate testing technology is revealing that your existing web pages have a lot of potential for improvement. By casting a wide net and experimenting with many small, almost invisible changes, you will almost certainly find a combination of these changes that produces a great increase in conversion rate.

Take a look at the example below (for the complete case study please visit e-Loser):

These two pages look almost exactly the same. Upon first look there is nothing that will make you think that any one of them should be 39% better.

Further analysis of the importance of each variation is making this picture even more startling:

The small numbers in the Relative Importance table are showing the difference in the conversion rate between a page that has one of the variations and the control (your existing web page). As you can see in this example, none of the new variation has had any significant impact individually.

But surprisingly, a combination of several small changes compounds to produce a very significant increase in the page conversion rate. Very few marketing professionals are aware of these multivariate testing methodology characteristics.

B: Be Different

During A-B or traditional multivariate tests you had to be prepared to experience a temporary dip in conversion rate during the optimization tests as a price of discovering a version of the page that will make money for you in the long run. This was happing because of the certainty that you will test more losers than winners and hence your conversion rate will temporarily suffer.

The fear of this testing risk was preventing many companies from even trying to optimize. And those who would dare would often elect to try to minimize the risk by testing more of the same. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different result. In reality, to get great results you have to try some new and radically different ideas.

To deal with the temporary loss concerns, many vendors will either downplay its occurrence or they would try to spin it in positive way, like it was done by a recent Ektron’s white paper: “Fail faster with multivariate testing“.

The adaptive multivariate testing technology is creating a breakthrough by its ability to eliminate this risk of testing. This technology is able to adapt to visitor’s behavior in real-time. The algorithm’s training period is very short (often no longer than couple of days). After that, only page combinations that have high probability to beat the base line are tested. As result, you will see an improvement in your conversion rate during the test itself.

C: Do not turn your optimization system off

A traditional approach to conversion rate optimization is a multi-step process: design the test, run the test, verify results, and then permanently implement the winning page.

With traditional optimization technologies you could not do it differently. These products are designed to act as testing tools and to passively measure the test outcomes.

To dramatize the difference between the adaptive multivariate testing approach and traditional testing methods we like to compare the traditional solution to a thermometer.

The adaptive method on the other side acts as an active component of the website that continually adopts itself to the most current visitor behavior. Hence, to stay in the same metaphor, we compare the adaptive approach to a thermostat. Like your home thermostat that is continually managing your energy consumption, your website thermostat will continually manage your online channel ROI.

Conclusion

The goal of this article was not to minimize an importance of the experienced online marketer who is necessary for achieving great increases in the website conversion rate. Instead, we wanted to suggest an effective way of using adaptive multivariate testing technology to expand the potential of a good marketing. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/9U_LXDiYHeQ/the-best-conversion-rate-optimization-practices-are-dead-well-not-so-soon Before the advent of multivariate testing technologies, the only option for conversion rate optimization practitioners was to follow empirically proven “best practices”. Now that multivariate tests are often showing that many of the best practices are not as generally applicable as originally thought, many are questioning their validity. We think that the best practices deserve the attention but be wary of their limitations. http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=434 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:21:42 -0800

If you never did any conversion rate optimization, you need to adopt a simple practical framework. The Internet is full of these “10 best” … “7 essential” … or other adjectives used to describe the most important things you need to do to optimize your pages. In the past, consultants would use these rules to design effective websites. With the advent of testing tools, these rules are then used to design A-B (sometimes called Split Tests) or multivariate tests (rarely, done only by very few large e-commerce players).

The most popular tool for A-B testing is Google’s Website Optimizer. To see what kind of results others are getting you should visit: WhichTestWon.com or Abtests.com.

Let us make our own contribution to the best practices framework:

	Your web pages are your most valuable online real-estate. Adding a new feature and content could make sense on the element-by-element basis. For example, additional text can help your organic SEO ranking, a breadcrumb navigation can enhance user experience, product recommendations can help visitors make easier buying decision, etc.

At some point, your web pages will start to look like a Christmas tree after the holidays, which can adversely impact your conversion rates.

The reality is that you must do everything possible so that your customers can find the products they want efficiently and help them make easy purchase decisions.

However, at some point your efforts will become counter productive.

Is there a sane way of approaching this subject

After presiding to hundreds conversion rate optimization tests we can tell you with certainty that all best practices are dead. There is no general rule that can predict visitor reaction to a particular page component and even less on changes of multiple page elements at the same time.

So, do not even bother with all the articles that start with “7 best …” or “ top 10.” Such advices can work some and can completely fail for others.

What you need is a scientific approach that can give you specific answers to your specific web page and the exact set of page elements. This scientific approach is called multivariate testing. For those who have never heard of this term, multivariate testing is defined as the experimentation with multiple page elements at the same time.

Multivariate Testing Is A Scientific Approach

The reason is very simple. Each web page has its own visual signature that forces human eye to read its content in a different way. This is because our brains are wired to notice the most visible element on the page first and not to scan a web page top to bottom or left to right.

By adding or removing an element of a web page you will change its visual signature. This will then change the order in which elements are read, which can have an unpredictable impact on how this new version of the page is processed by a web visitor.

In the online business, your enemy is the very short visitor attention span. A typical reaction time is less than second or two. So, if you do not ‘hook’ your visitor quickly, he is gone and you have lost a conversion (or sale).

Be aware of A-B test flaws

One might argue that a simple A-B testing, where you will test the impact of one element at a time, will do the job. This is highly unlikely. Applying the results of the individual tests and then extending that logic to combinations of elements will only work if each element is completely independent from one another. This is rarely the case.

For example, in your A-B test you might determine that a red Add-To-Cart button is better than a blue one, and that green font color for the product price is better than a maroon color. However, after running a multivariate test of all the possible page combinations, you might find that the combination with highest conversion rate is the one that has maroon font color for price and a blue Add-To-Cart button.

Why such unexpected behavior? We already mentioned a technical answer: each combination has its own visual signature and conversion rate. Practical reasoning might be described like this: your product has a very completive price – the maroon color of your price is more visible against the blue Add-To-Cart button – as a result, the visitor is quickly ‘hooked’ to your price and the decision to buy is made more frequently.

The Usual Suspects

Here is a short list of troubled elements that should help you formalize your thinking and arrange multivariate testing:

We are sure that others can identify many other types of content or widgets that are being added to a typical web site. Our objective was to initialize your thinking so that you can apply similar testing criteria on any other web page element that your website might have.

	One would think that the days of ‘dot-com’ businesses are the distant past. Lessons learned. Dues paid. We know better today. Well, take look at the online marketing business. How is it possible that more than 10 years since the demise of ‘eye balls’ as a measure of website performance do we find that we are still stuck in the “number of visitors” paradigm?

E-Commerce Metrics: Data Overload

The issue is not about availability of website analytics data. Actually, it is the opposite. This way, online marketers are hit by mountains of non-relevant and non-actionable data.

That is why for the majority of companies, the number of web visitors is still the main KPI (key performance indicator). We all understand what that number means and thanks to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and armies of SEO consultants, we all know how to increase it (with the help of hard dollars or soft marketing actions).

On the other side, the conversion rate numbers are quietly swept under the rug. They are treated as temperature readings that nobody can control.

Well, let us break the news. Website conversion rates can be controlled and a ‘website thermostat’ already exists. Can your company afford not to use it?

A Beginning Of A New Marketing Era

The Adobe’s $1.8 B acquisition of Omniture (one of the largest web analytics and web optimization companies) marks the beginning of mainstream adoption of smart website management technology (i.e. the use of a ‘website thermostat’).

The main theme of this acquisition is that ‘Marketing is the new finance.’ The historic shift from traditional to online medium and its associated ability to collect and act on marketing data in real time is impacting the corporate marketing function in similar ways as the advancement of computer has impacted the finance industry in the 60s.

So, how should this impact your thinking and behavior?

Here is a simplistic picture of the online battlefield. On one side you have a limited number of qualified visitors (potential buyers). On the other side you have ever-increasing number of e-commerce merchants and lead generation companies competing for web visitor attention.

Getting more web visitors is increasingly hard and expensive for many companies. Just check the latest PPC numbers for your keywords. Organic SEO and social marketing are great, but not every company can earn its place on the fist page of the Google’s search.

Smart companies have already discovered that a small investment in CRO (conversion rate optimization) is producing dramatically higher ROI than the alternative investment in traffic generation.

Simple Practical Steps

CRO is not as complicated as you might think. Here is a simple 3-step framework to get you up to speed:

Step #1: Get familiar with your conversion rates

Step #2: Understand different testing methods

Step #3: Play

We believe that marketing is rapidly becoming science rather than art. With the start of the new decade you have an opportunity to enhance your online marketing playbook with the conversion rate optimization capability. This is a virtually risk free method for increasing online sales.

There seems to be a lot of noise in the Digital Marketing world at the moment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to sort out which technologies and companies can really help you achieve your goals as an eCommerce site. Can more traffic really be the endgame? Will a new site really help more people find what they want from you? Why do so many SEOs keep calling you with an offer to be on Page One of Google for the keywords of your choice?
Don’t let that distract you from things that can really make a difference to you — and in the end, unless you’re a glorified billboard on the Internet, the real difference-maker is more money. While being #1 on the search engine listings is nice, and important, it’s not the difference-maker that CRO is.

Merchandise is Ready to Go - Are You Optimized for the Holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone knows the words to the song. Pretty soon, any retail outlet you approach will be booming out holiday-cheer tunes ad nauseam. But, for the moment, let’s try to keep the urge to vomit down and think about what really matters for eCommerce — and that’s making your website the BEST POSSIBLE store window you can have. Store window, eh, you say? Yes, you’re probably right. That metaphor doesn’t really work too well any more. Frankly, people arrive at your online checkout page through a variety of sources, and the important thing for you is to INCREASE REVENUE.

Increase revenue = conversion goal. It’s that simple. So how can CRO help that number to rise? and can it really rise in time to make the holiday season more profitable for a site like yours?

I know what you’re thinking, it’s always risky to try something new when the number of visitors is highest and at the time of the year when revenues are most critical to the company “making the numbers.” Right?

So let me tell you why – or rather, three ways how CRO is going to make you more money during this holiday season.

Three Ways CRO Makes You More Money

• CRO takes variations of your page and, through the technology, rearranges them through how your visitors react to them. After a very small number of visitors, CRO converges on the best combination of those variations, making subsequent visitors MUCH MORE LIKELY to buy. That leads to an increased conversion rate while you test.
• The right CRO product is architected in a way to burn through very few visitors to begin converging, and requires no technical staff or technical intervention to work.
• You don’t need a new website, or more visitors — the technology lets these assets “sweat” more for you.

Three Things You Don’t Need in Order to Do CRO

• Glorified heat maps. Yes, it’s nice to analyze where potential customer eyes go, and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as testing everything. Get a tool that will let you.
• Someone else “best practices” imported into your eCommerce site. Why’s that? Because someone else’s best practice applied to you is the surest way to create yourself an average company. Invasive species are usually unwelcome in a new ecosystem.
• Expensive consultants. A good design person isn’t expensive, can plug the variations into the right tool, and then the test runs itself. You don’t need reports about statements of work, areas to target, etc.

Thermostats Help Regulate, Unlike Thermometers

Thermometers Provide Information - Useful Only in Context

Why the Right KPIs Don’t Just Tell, They Act

Having seen enough KPIs in enough organizations — as I am sure you have, too — I agree that it’s time to get serious about dealing with analytics. Avinash Kaushik’s recent post talks about KPIs to die for. Naturally, since Hiconversion is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) SaaS vendor, I agree with him that Conversion Rate is #1.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the agreement ends. Typically, the discussion in the market tends to take on this sort of tone. And if you frame CRO in terms of Google Website Optimizer or Omniture, you’re bound to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why do I say that? Three reasons, really:

• Google Website Optimizer is an excellent thermometer. It can tell you the temperature, but can’t actually do anything about it without expensive consulting services, lots and lots of hard-earned website traffic, and extensive technical intervention – unless testing two AND ONLY two versions of your page (A/B testing) over a long period of time and hoping that one of these two pages is a “correct guess” suits your business. And Google Website Optimizer will never actually “act” for you.
• Omniture is a wonderful analytics suite that costs a fortune in terms of license and support. It’s an expensive thermometer with a limited ability to “act”, and unless you have a large traffic profile, technically inclined staff, and analytics experts, it’s generally not going to give you the results you need. It certainly cannot be a thermostat without significant integration to other systems.
• That excludes about 95-99% of eBusinesses who could really use CRO to get more revenue, within a few short weeks, using their same website and at their same traffic levels, with minimal technical intervention or “consulting services.”

I’m not trying to turn this blog posting into a sales pitch for Hiconversion — I’m more interested in analyzing the tone of the discussion in the market, and what it really means to most eBusinesses. More importantly, I think that if we agree that Conversion Rate is the most important KPI an eBusiness can use to regulate its business, then using a thermostat and NOT a thermometer is crucial. Acting in June on temperature readings from March demonstrates the point — act on the data as you receive them, not months later.

An affordable, easy-to-set thermostat is naturally preferable, right? And a conversion rate tool that drives visitors towards the optimal “winning page combination” is very important if you don’t have the technical or analytics expertise in-house and want to keep costs down.

There aren’t many affordable Conversion Rate thermostats out there, but free thermometers can’t do what efficient, effective, and current thermostats can. Be choosy and select the one that fits your business-critical KPIs. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/g-sQV0LMHMw/increasing-conversion-is-not-reducing-bounces With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=280 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:48:55 -0700 With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog post as an example.

Conversion Rate Matters More Than How Many Bounces You Get

Frequently, I read blog postings by people that take the tone of Google Optimizer – Have You Tried It? This post raises several causes for concern in my mind. Now, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to pick on this posting — what I am doing is using it as an example for what I see as a perception that seems to be widely shared.

Why does it cause concern? I’ll give you three reasons:

• With tools like Autonomy (a.k.a. Optimost, Omniture, Adobe), Vertster, and Hiconversion leading the way in conversion rate optimization (CRO) on websites, Google Website Optimizer seems to fall into the category of “free is not cheap enough.” Of course, since Google is pervasive, it gets used by lots of websites, but considering that most only use it for A/B testing (as the above post mentions, not to pick on it but it was a post yesterday that came to my attention) and the traffic level required is extremely high, this makes it difficult to use for most websites doing business on the web today.
• Google Website Optimizer is not necessarily going to help educate the market. Take, again, yesterday’s post as a common example – the focus seems to be on traffic, and bounce rates. That feels like the tip of a very large iceberg. One might be tempted to say, “Good start.” But what is the site’s conversion rate? There’s no evidence that anyone has worked out that, for every 100 site visitors that come to the shopping cart, 3 click “purchase.” The field “Est. Conv. Rate” on the Google Website Optimizer screen in the blog post has nothing to do with that, as far as I can tell. The only evidence frequently offered has to do with reducing bounce rates. Websites are not billboards, they’re stores. The name of the game is to make money.
• Analysis is good, but it’s expensive and requires specialists. Again, if you’re not a statistician, do you really understand how multi-variate testing delivers much more impact than A/B testing? or how you have to set up the test to ensure the variations will produce reliable results? or what you’d have to be looking for in your analytics reports (and how to set those up…)? Again, Google Website Optimizer can be quite misleading when it’s in the wrong hands.

What do you think? Is “free” cheap enough? Do business think conversion rate is about how many people buy, or reducing your bounce rate? Comments welcome. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/dgUW6zQ-i2o/the-three-most-overlooked-elements-of-digital-marketing There is a new frontier in Digital Marketing that leverages the investment that has been made in the past. Having built a website, put an operational wrap around it, agreed an online marketing strategy with organizational leadership, and set forth an organic and paid traffic-driving plan … there’s still the small matter of converting those [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=231 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:33:51 -0700

Executive Summary

The three most overlooked elements of Digital Marketing, simply put, are:

• Conversion,
• Conversion, and
• Conversion.

CRO targets bottom-line results

Conversions Tie Directly to Revenue

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is focused on precisely one thing – tightly tying the money spent optimizing conversions to actual revenue achieved by the company.

Conversion

It’s easy to ignore conversion. Offline media, such as print advertisements, have begun their slow – or, in some cases, rapid – decline. However, as social media have exploded, the complexity of business has increased for many businesses. What was once simply a loosely correlated set of metrics to revenue, such as “brand awareness,” driving marketing spend, has been replaced with a myriad of key performance indicators (KPIs). The prevalence of cost-per-click (CPC), for example, is one in a long parade of metrics whose relationship with ROI is not a direct correlation. Click-through rate (CTR) is another.

Many, many marketers have started into the Digital Marketing world armed with these metrics. Other KPIs followed, too numerous to list here.

Faced with such an array of KPIs, focusing on ROI – return on investment – can somehow seem less important. CPC and CTR might be things that you’re currently tracking, but will they directly drive revenue for your business? For almost everyone, the answer is a distinct “no.”

Conversion

Adding to the fire, there are always more activities to do and more ways to explore reaching potential customers by driving traffic through unique media such as mobile search, affiliate marketing, banners, commerce and e-tail sites, digital outdoor, e-mail, and pricing promotions, just to name a few that spring to mind. Again, the proliferation of Marketing channels is astonishing in speed and breathtaking in adoption.

None of these media – which can deliver surprising traffic uplifts, used in the right business context – will guarantee additional revenue, however. The best ROI case is that one assumes that a “more relevant” set of potential customers can be reached through the right campaign in these media.

However, generally speaking, more traffic creates a linear uplift in revenue in the best case, i.e. 1,000 more visitors, 50 convert at our 5% conversion rate, and so we now have 50 more customers. In the best case.

Conversion

CRO is one of those rare things in business that offers “low-hanging fruit” (to use an overused term) in terms of additional business benefit. Most companies have not embarked on CRO previously – barriers such as complexity to execute the test, a dip in conversion rate as the test is ongoing, a desire to re-launch one’s website rather than make the existing one “sweat” more were all reasons NOT to embark upon CRO – and it offers the opportunity to get an exponential ROI, not just a linear uplift. When’s the last time a project had a believable hockey-stick revenue shape to it?

With Hiconversion’s next-generation CRO, those barriers have fallen. Testing can be done by virtually any business person that can point-and-click; conversion rate rises DURING the test; existing websites can become revenue-generation machines without the need for a risky or expensive overhaul.

Best of all, with no increase in traffic, converting just 10% more of the visitors will exponentially increase revenue – starting virtually immediately.

Conclusion

CRO is a discipline that can no longer be ignored. This “new frontier” of eCommerce has now been opened and will deliver high ROI for those that choose to embark. What’s stopping you?

Surprisingly even the largest e-commerce companies that have resources, expensive tools, and a high volume of web traffic are still running only A-B tests. When asked why, they will tell you about reasons that reveal a false understanding of what A-B Split testing can do for them.

Industry experts, analysts, and bloggers are not helping either. Often you can hear them talking about A-B and Multivariate testing in the same breath like they are talking about the same thing.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

Here is our attempt to dispel the most widespread myths and to articulate the difference between A-B split and Multivariate Testing (MVT) methods.

Myth #1 – A-B split testing is less risky

Myth #2 – A-B split testing is great for quick learning

Myth #3 – A-B split testing is best for a new designs or big changes

Myth #4 – A-B split testing is the best for big increases in conversion rate

Myth #5 – A-B split testing is much simpler to setup

Myth #6 – A-B split testing is less costly

Myth #7 – A-B split testing is the best for small to medium companies or for ‘long tail’ web pages at the big e-commerce sites

With more complex algorithms that factor in local, personal and universal search features, search rankings are not always consistent. Today’s results often depend on a user’s location, their search history and their behavior with the search results – sometimes you can see different search results for the same search terms, even on two different computers in the same location.

One question many businesses have when hunting for a search engine optimization (SEO) company is, “Will this company know us and our audience well enough to turn our web business into something profitable, worthy of our investment?” Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discern the answer before you are three months into an agreement.

Web Traffic vs. Engagement

Is the goal of SEO to get as much traffic as possible to a website? Many SEO companies will lead you to believe that more traffic is all there is to it. Granted, getting more traffic is a part of it, but more eyeballs on a web page do not necessarily mean achieving your business goals.

Look at your web analytics – specifically the keywords that brought in the majority of traffic – then evaluate the quality of this traffic over the past month or quarter. A high bounce rate and low average time on site for visits from a particular keyword can indicate one or all of these:

Let me suggest that the focus of SEO should be audience engagement, rather than traffic. According to Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, “Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” That’s pretty clear: Without specific goals, driving more traffic to your website sounds like a good option.

But if a visitor hits your site and bounces, your depth of visitor interaction is null. To truly engage a visitor requires relevance and targeted communication. So what is best for your business? I offer a different approach: using SEO to build audience engagement.

“But,” you ask, “what does that have to do with SEO?” Everything, if you want long-term customer loyalty rather than more, sort-of-qualified traffic. Loyalty is a measurable metric and often comes with SEO rewards like fabulous testimonials and links from customer sites.

At the end of the day, businesses want SEO consultants who tailor their Internet marketing directly to the bottom line by bringing valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and returning customers – rather than simply getting more traffic to the site.

About the Author

Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, founded in 2000 to provide tailored Internet marketing plans – valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and loyal customers.

Up to very recently, conversion rate optimization (CRO) was dominated by consultants who were providing the optimization solutions as a blend of empirical experience with a little bit of technology. The practitioners were relying more on the art of persuasive copy writing and the best design practices, and less on the technology and scientific methods. The advent of new multivariate testing technologies, adaptive multivariate testing in particular, is significantly impacting the industry’s best practices. Although they are still important and relevant, they are no longer dominant. Using traditional best practices is a great way to initialize the CRO journey but they are by no means the final destination.

New optimization technology is consistently revealing that what works for one company may not work for another. Even more subtle, two vendors selling the exactly the same type product, optimizing the very same type of web page elements, using the same marketing ideas, might get significantly different outcomes.

That is why three simple rules below are so important for opening doors for the use of technology and creating much higher value with the conversion rate optimization.

A: Maximize the performance of existing web pages before considering a new design

One of the biggest misconceptions in conversion rate optimization business is thinking that the only way that you can get higher page conversion rates is to completely re-design your web page or a complete website. This immediately sounds like a complicated and expensive endeavor that turns off the great majority e-merchants. They think: Not now. We have no time, money, or resources to do it.

The multivariate testing technology is revealing that your existing web pages have a lot of potential for improvement. By casting a wide net and experimenting with many small, almost invisible changes, you will almost certainly find a combination of these changes that produces a great increase in conversion rate.

Take a look at the example below (for the complete case study please visit e-Loser):

These two pages look almost exactly the same. Upon first look there is nothing that will make you think that any one of them should be 39% better.

Further analysis of the importance of each variation is making this picture even more startling:

The small numbers in the Relative Importance table are showing the difference in the conversion rate between a page that has one of the variations and the control (your existing web page). As you can see in this example, none of the new variation has had any significant impact individually.

But surprisingly, a combination of several small changes compounds to produce a very significant increase in the page conversion rate. Very few marketing professionals are aware of these multivariate testing methodology characteristics.

B: Be Different

During A-B or traditional multivariate tests you had to be prepared to experience a temporary dip in conversion rate during the optimization tests as a price of discovering a version of the page that will make money for you in the long run. This was happing because of the certainty that you will test more losers than winners and hence your conversion rate will temporarily suffer.

The fear of this testing risk was preventing many companies from even trying to optimize. And those who would dare would often elect to try to minimize the risk by testing more of the same. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different result. In reality, to get great results you have to try some new and radically different ideas.

To deal with the temporary loss concerns, many vendors will either downplay its occurrence or they would try to spin it in positive way, like it was done by a recent Ektron’s white paper: “Fail faster with multivariate testing“.

The adaptive multivariate testing technology is creating a breakthrough by its ability to eliminate this risk of testing. This technology is able to adapt to visitor’s behavior in real-time. The algorithm’s training period is very short (often no longer than couple of days). After that, only page combinations that have high probability to beat the base line are tested. As result, you will see an improvement in your conversion rate during the test itself.

C: Do not turn your optimization system off

A traditional approach to conversion rate optimization is a multi-step process: design the test, run the test, verify results, and then permanently implement the winning page.

With traditional optimization technologies you could not do it differently. These products are designed to act as testing tools and to passively measure the test outcomes.

To dramatize the difference between the adaptive multivariate testing approach and traditional testing methods we like to compare the traditional solution to a thermometer.

The adaptive method on the other side acts as an active component of the website that continually adopts itself to the most current visitor behavior. Hence, to stay in the same metaphor, we compare the adaptive approach to a thermostat. Like your home thermostat that is continually managing your energy consumption, your website thermostat will continually manage your online channel ROI.

Conclusion

The goal of this article was not to minimize an importance of the experienced online marketer who is necessary for achieving great increases in the website conversion rate. Instead, we wanted to suggest an effective way of using adaptive multivariate testing technology to expand the potential of a good marketing. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/9U_LXDiYHeQ/the-best-conversion-rate-optimization-practices-are-dead-well-not-so-soon Before the advent of multivariate testing technologies, the only option for conversion rate optimization practitioners was to follow empirically proven “best practices”. Now that multivariate tests are often showing that many of the best practices are not as generally applicable as originally thought, many are questioning their validity. We think that the best practices deserve the attention but be wary of their limitations. http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=434 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:21:42 -0800

If you never did any conversion rate optimization, you need to adopt a simple practical framework. The Internet is full of these “10 best” … “7 essential” … or other adjectives used to describe the most important things you need to do to optimize your pages. In the past, consultants would use these rules to design effective websites. With the advent of testing tools, these rules are then used to design A-B (sometimes called Split Tests) or multivariate tests (rarely, done only by very few large e-commerce players).

The most popular tool for A-B testing is Google’s Website Optimizer. To see what kind of results others are getting you should visit: WhichTestWon.com or Abtests.com.

Let us make our own contribution to the best practices framework:

	Your web pages are your most valuable online real-estate. Adding a new feature and content could make sense on the element-by-element basis. For example, additional text can help your organic SEO ranking, a breadcrumb navigation can enhance user experience, product recommendations can help visitors make easier buying decision, etc.

At some point, your web pages will start to look like a Christmas tree after the holidays, which can adversely impact your conversion rates.

The reality is that you must do everything possible so that your customers can find the products they want efficiently and help them make easy purchase decisions.

However, at some point your efforts will become counter productive.

Is there a sane way of approaching this subject

After presiding to hundreds conversion rate optimization tests we can tell you with certainty that all best practices are dead. There is no general rule that can predict visitor reaction to a particular page component and even less on changes of multiple page elements at the same time.

So, do not even bother with all the articles that start with “7 best …” or “ top 10.” Such advices can work some and can completely fail for others.

What you need is a scientific approach that can give you specific answers to your specific web page and the exact set of page elements. This scientific approach is called multivariate testing. For those who have never heard of this term, multivariate testing is defined as the experimentation with multiple page elements at the same time.

Multivariate Testing Is A Scientific Approach

The reason is very simple. Each web page has its own visual signature that forces human eye to read its content in a different way. This is because our brains are wired to notice the most visible element on the page first and not to scan a web page top to bottom or left to right.

By adding or removing an element of a web page you will change its visual signature. This will then change the order in which elements are read, which can have an unpredictable impact on how this new version of the page is processed by a web visitor.

In the online business, your enemy is the very short visitor attention span. A typical reaction time is less than second or two. So, if you do not ‘hook’ your visitor quickly, he is gone and you have lost a conversion (or sale).

Be aware of A-B test flaws

One might argue that a simple A-B testing, where you will test the impact of one element at a time, will do the job. This is highly unlikely. Applying the results of the individual tests and then extending that logic to combinations of elements will only work if each element is completely independent from one another. This is rarely the case.

For example, in your A-B test you might determine that a red Add-To-Cart button is better than a blue one, and that green font color for the product price is better than a maroon color. However, after running a multivariate test of all the possible page combinations, you might find that the combination with highest conversion rate is the one that has maroon font color for price and a blue Add-To-Cart button.

Why such unexpected behavior? We already mentioned a technical answer: each combination has its own visual signature and conversion rate. Practical reasoning might be described like this: your product has a very completive price – the maroon color of your price is more visible against the blue Add-To-Cart button – as a result, the visitor is quickly ‘hooked’ to your price and the decision to buy is made more frequently.

The Usual Suspects

Here is a short list of troubled elements that should help you formalize your thinking and arrange multivariate testing:

We are sure that others can identify many other types of content or widgets that are being added to a typical web site. Our objective was to initialize your thinking so that you can apply similar testing criteria on any other web page element that your website might have.

	One would think that the days of ‘dot-com’ businesses are the distant past. Lessons learned. Dues paid. We know better today. Well, take look at the online marketing business. How is it possible that more than 10 years since the demise of ‘eye balls’ as a measure of website performance do we find that we are still stuck in the “number of visitors” paradigm?

E-Commerce Metrics: Data Overload

The issue is not about availability of website analytics data. Actually, it is the opposite. This way, online marketers are hit by mountains of non-relevant and non-actionable data.

That is why for the majority of companies, the number of web visitors is still the main KPI (key performance indicator). We all understand what that number means and thanks to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and armies of SEO consultants, we all know how to increase it (with the help of hard dollars or soft marketing actions).

On the other side, the conversion rate numbers are quietly swept under the rug. They are treated as temperature readings that nobody can control.

Well, let us break the news. Website conversion rates can be controlled and a ‘website thermostat’ already exists. Can your company afford not to use it?

A Beginning Of A New Marketing Era

The Adobe’s $1.8 B acquisition of Omniture (one of the largest web analytics and web optimization companies) marks the beginning of mainstream adoption of smart website management technology (i.e. the use of a ‘website thermostat’).

The main theme of this acquisition is that ‘Marketing is the new finance.’ The historic shift from traditional to online medium and its associated ability to collect and act on marketing data in real time is impacting the corporate marketing function in similar ways as the advancement of computer has impacted the finance industry in the 60s.

So, how should this impact your thinking and behavior?

Here is a simplistic picture of the online battlefield. On one side you have a limited number of qualified visitors (potential buyers). On the other side you have ever-increasing number of e-commerce merchants and lead generation companies competing for web visitor attention.

Getting more web visitors is increasingly hard and expensive for many companies. Just check the latest PPC numbers for your keywords. Organic SEO and social marketing are great, but not every company can earn its place on the fist page of the Google’s search.

Smart companies have already discovered that a small investment in CRO (conversion rate optimization) is producing dramatically higher ROI than the alternative investment in traffic generation.

Simple Practical Steps

CRO is not as complicated as you might think. Here is a simple 3-step framework to get you up to speed:

Step #1: Get familiar with your conversion rates

Step #2: Understand different testing methods

Step #3: Play

We believe that marketing is rapidly becoming science rather than art. With the start of the new decade you have an opportunity to enhance your online marketing playbook with the conversion rate optimization capability. This is a virtually risk free method for increasing online sales.

There seems to be a lot of noise in the Digital Marketing world at the moment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to sort out which technologies and companies can really help you achieve your goals as an eCommerce site. Can more traffic really be the endgame? Will a new site really help more people find what they want from you? Why do so many SEOs keep calling you with an offer to be on Page One of Google for the keywords of your choice?
Don’t let that distract you from things that can really make a difference to you — and in the end, unless you’re a glorified billboard on the Internet, the real difference-maker is more money. While being #1 on the search engine listings is nice, and important, it’s not the difference-maker that CRO is.

Merchandise is Ready to Go - Are You Optimized for the Holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone knows the words to the song. Pretty soon, any retail outlet you approach will be booming out holiday-cheer tunes ad nauseam. But, for the moment, let’s try to keep the urge to vomit down and think about what really matters for eCommerce — and that’s making your website the BEST POSSIBLE store window you can have. Store window, eh, you say? Yes, you’re probably right. That metaphor doesn’t really work too well any more. Frankly, people arrive at your online checkout page through a variety of sources, and the important thing for you is to INCREASE REVENUE.

Increase revenue = conversion goal. It’s that simple. So how can CRO help that number to rise? and can it really rise in time to make the holiday season more profitable for a site like yours?

I know what you’re thinking, it’s always risky to try something new when the number of visitors is highest and at the time of the year when revenues are most critical to the company “making the numbers.” Right?

So let me tell you why – or rather, three ways how CRO is going to make you more money during this holiday season.

Three Ways CRO Makes You More Money

• CRO takes variations of your page and, through the technology, rearranges them through how your visitors react to them. After a very small number of visitors, CRO converges on the best combination of those variations, making subsequent visitors MUCH MORE LIKELY to buy. That leads to an increased conversion rate while you test.
• The right CRO product is architected in a way to burn through very few visitors to begin converging, and requires no technical staff or technical intervention to work.
• You don’t need a new website, or more visitors — the technology lets these assets “sweat” more for you.

Three Things You Don’t Need in Order to Do CRO

• Glorified heat maps. Yes, it’s nice to analyze where potential customer eyes go, and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as testing everything. Get a tool that will let you.
• Someone else “best practices” imported into your eCommerce site. Why’s that? Because someone else’s best practice applied to you is the surest way to create yourself an average company. Invasive species are usually unwelcome in a new ecosystem.
• Expensive consultants. A good design person isn’t expensive, can plug the variations into the right tool, and then the test runs itself. You don’t need reports about statements of work, areas to target, etc.

Thermostats Help Regulate, Unlike Thermometers

Thermometers Provide Information - Useful Only in Context

Why the Right KPIs Don’t Just Tell, They Act

Having seen enough KPIs in enough organizations — as I am sure you have, too — I agree that it’s time to get serious about dealing with analytics. Avinash Kaushik’s recent post talks about KPIs to die for. Naturally, since Hiconversion is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) SaaS vendor, I agree with him that Conversion Rate is #1.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the agreement ends. Typically, the discussion in the market tends to take on this sort of tone. And if you frame CRO in terms of Google Website Optimizer or Omniture, you’re bound to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why do I say that? Three reasons, really:

• Google Website Optimizer is an excellent thermometer. It can tell you the temperature, but can’t actually do anything about it without expensive consulting services, lots and lots of hard-earned website traffic, and extensive technical intervention – unless testing two AND ONLY two versions of your page (A/B testing) over a long period of time and hoping that one of these two pages is a “correct guess” suits your business. And Google Website Optimizer will never actually “act” for you.
• Omniture is a wonderful analytics suite that costs a fortune in terms of license and support. It’s an expensive thermometer with a limited ability to “act”, and unless you have a large traffic profile, technically inclined staff, and analytics experts, it’s generally not going to give you the results you need. It certainly cannot be a thermostat without significant integration to other systems.
• That excludes about 95-99% of eBusinesses who could really use CRO to get more revenue, within a few short weeks, using their same website and at their same traffic levels, with minimal technical intervention or “consulting services.”

I’m not trying to turn this blog posting into a sales pitch for Hiconversion — I’m more interested in analyzing the tone of the discussion in the market, and what it really means to most eBusinesses. More importantly, I think that if we agree that Conversion Rate is the most important KPI an eBusiness can use to regulate its business, then using a thermostat and NOT a thermometer is crucial. Acting in June on temperature readings from March demonstrates the point — act on the data as you receive them, not months later.

An affordable, easy-to-set thermostat is naturally preferable, right? And a conversion rate tool that drives visitors towards the optimal “winning page combination” is very important if you don’t have the technical or analytics expertise in-house and want to keep costs down.

There aren’t many affordable Conversion Rate thermostats out there, but free thermometers can’t do what efficient, effective, and current thermostats can. Be choosy and select the one that fits your business-critical KPIs. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/g-sQV0LMHMw/increasing-conversion-is-not-reducing-bounces With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=280 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:48:55 -0700 With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog post as an example.

Conversion Rate Matters More Than How Many Bounces You Get

Frequently, I read blog postings by people that take the tone of Google Optimizer – Have You Tried It? This post raises several causes for concern in my mind. Now, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to pick on this posting — what I am doing is using it as an example for what I see as a perception that seems to be widely shared.

Why does it cause concern? I’ll give you three reasons:

• With tools like Autonomy (a.k.a. Optimost, Omniture, Adobe), Vertster, and Hiconversion leading the way in conversion rate optimization (CRO) on websites, Google Website Optimizer seems to fall into the category of “free is not cheap enough.” Of course, since Google is pervasive, it gets used by lots of websites, but considering that most only use it for A/B testing (as the above post mentions, not to pick on it but it was a post yesterday that came to my attention) and the traffic level required is extremely high, this makes it difficult to use for most websites doing business on the web today.
• Google Website Optimizer is not necessarily going to help educate the market. Take, again, yesterday’s post as a common example – the focus seems to be on traffic, and bounce rates. That feels like the tip of a very large iceberg. One might be tempted to say, “Good start.” But what is the site’s conversion rate? There’s no evidence that anyone has worked out that, for every 100 site visitors that come to the shopping cart, 3 click “purchase.” The field “Est. Conv. Rate” on the Google Website Optimizer screen in the blog post has nothing to do with that, as far as I can tell. The only evidence frequently offered has to do with reducing bounce rates. Websites are not billboards, they’re stores. The name of the game is to make money.
• Analysis is good, but it’s expensive and requires specialists. Again, if you’re not a statistician, do you really understand how multi-variate testing delivers much more impact than A/B testing? or how you have to set up the test to ensure the variations will produce reliable results? or what you’d have to be looking for in your analytics reports (and how to set those up…)? Again, Google Website Optimizer can be quite misleading when it’s in the wrong hands.

What do you think? Is “free” cheap enough? Do business think conversion rate is about how many people buy, or reducing your bounce rate? Comments welcome. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/dgUW6zQ-i2o/the-three-most-overlooked-elements-of-digital-marketing There is a new frontier in Digital Marketing that leverages the investment that has been made in the past. Having built a website, put an operational wrap around it, agreed an online marketing strategy with organizational leadership, and set forth an organic and paid traffic-driving plan … there’s still the small matter of converting those [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=231 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:33:51 -0700

Executive Summary

The three most overlooked elements of Digital Marketing, simply put, are:

• Conversion,
• Conversion, and
• Conversion.

CRO targets bottom-line results

Conversions Tie Directly to Revenue

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is focused on precisely one thing – tightly tying the money spent optimizing conversions to actual revenue achieved by the company.

Conversion

It’s easy to ignore conversion. Offline media, such as print advertisements, have begun their slow – or, in some cases, rapid – decline. However, as social media have exploded, the complexity of business has increased for many businesses. What was once simply a loosely correlated set of metrics to revenue, such as “brand awareness,” driving marketing spend, has been replaced with a myriad of key performance indicators (KPIs). The prevalence of cost-per-click (CPC), for example, is one in a long parade of metrics whose relationship with ROI is not a direct correlation. Click-through rate (CTR) is another.

Many, many marketers have started into the Digital Marketing world armed with these metrics. Other KPIs followed, too numerous to list here.

Faced with such an array of KPIs, focusing on ROI – return on investment – can somehow seem less important. CPC and CTR might be things that you’re currently tracking, but will they directly drive revenue for your business? For almost everyone, the answer is a distinct “no.”

Conversion

Adding to the fire, there are always more activities to do and more ways to explore reaching potential customers by driving traffic through unique media such as mobile search, affiliate marketing, banners, commerce and e-tail sites, digital outdoor, e-mail, and pricing promotions, just to name a few that spring to mind. Again, the proliferation of Marketing channels is astonishing in speed and breathtaking in adoption.

None of these media – which can deliver surprising traffic uplifts, used in the right business context – will guarantee additional revenue, however. The best ROI case is that one assumes that a “more relevant” set of potential customers can be reached through the right campaign in these media.

However, generally speaking, more traffic creates a linear uplift in revenue in the best case, i.e. 1,000 more visitors, 50 convert at our 5% conversion rate, and so we now have 50 more customers. In the best case.

Conversion

CRO is one of those rare things in business that offers “low-hanging fruit” (to use an overused term) in terms of additional business benefit. Most companies have not embarked on CRO previously – barriers such as complexity to execute the test, a dip in conversion rate as the test is ongoing, a desire to re-launch one’s website rather than make the existing one “sweat” more were all reasons NOT to embark upon CRO – and it offers the opportunity to get an exponential ROI, not just a linear uplift. When’s the last time a project had a believable hockey-stick revenue shape to it?

With Hiconversion’s next-generation CRO, those barriers have fallen. Testing can be done by virtually any business person that can point-and-click; conversion rate rises DURING the test; existing websites can become revenue-generation machines without the need for a risky or expensive overhaul.

Best of all, with no increase in traffic, converting just 10% more of the visitors will exponentially increase revenue – starting virtually immediately.

Conclusion

CRO is a discipline that can no longer be ignored. This “new frontier” of eCommerce has now been opened and will deliver high ROI for those that choose to embark. What’s stopping you?

Surprisingly even the largest e-commerce companies that have resources, expensive tools, and a high volume of web traffic are still running only A-B tests. When asked why, they will tell you about reasons that reveal a false understanding of what A-B Split testing can do for them.

Industry experts, analysts, and bloggers are not helping either. Often you can hear them talking about A-B and Multivariate testing in the same breath like they are talking about the same thing.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

Here is our attempt to dispel the most widespread myths and to articulate the difference between A-B split and Multivariate Testing (MVT) methods.

Myth #1 – A-B split testing is less risky

Myth #2 – A-B split testing is great for quick learning

Myth #3 – A-B split testing is best for a new designs or big changes

Myth #4 – A-B split testing is the best for big increases in conversion rate

Myth #5 – A-B split testing is much simpler to setup

Myth #6 – A-B split testing is less costly

Myth #7 – A-B split testing is the best for small to medium companies or for ‘long tail’ web pages at the big e-commerce sites

With more complex algorithms that factor in local, personal and universal search features, search rankings are not always consistent. Today’s results often depend on a user’s location, their search history and their behavior with the search results – sometimes you can see different search results for the same search terms, even on two different computers in the same location.

One question many businesses have when hunting for a search engine optimization (SEO) company is, “Will this company know us and our audience well enough to turn our web business into something profitable, worthy of our investment?” Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discern the answer before you are three months into an agreement.

Web Traffic vs. Engagement

Is the goal of SEO to get as much traffic as possible to a website? Many SEO companies will lead you to believe that more traffic is all there is to it. Granted, getting more traffic is a part of it, but more eyeballs on a web page do not necessarily mean achieving your business goals.

Look at your web analytics – specifically the keywords that brought in the majority of traffic – then evaluate the quality of this traffic over the past month or quarter. A high bounce rate and low average time on site for visits from a particular keyword can indicate one or all of these:

Let me suggest that the focus of SEO should be audience engagement, rather than traffic. According to Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, “Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” That’s pretty clear: Without specific goals, driving more traffic to your website sounds like a good option.

But if a visitor hits your site and bounces, your depth of visitor interaction is null. To truly engage a visitor requires relevance and targeted communication. So what is best for your business? I offer a different approach: using SEO to build audience engagement.

“But,” you ask, “what does that have to do with SEO?” Everything, if you want long-term customer loyalty rather than more, sort-of-qualified traffic. Loyalty is a measurable metric and often comes with SEO rewards like fabulous testimonials and links from customer sites.

At the end of the day, businesses want SEO consultants who tailor their Internet marketing directly to the bottom line by bringing valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and returning customers – rather than simply getting more traffic to the site.

About the Author

Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, founded in 2000 to provide tailored Internet marketing plans – valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and loyal customers.

Up to very recently, conversion rate optimization (CRO) was dominated by consultants who were providing the optimization solutions as a blend of empirical experience with a little bit of technology. The practitioners were relying more on the art of persuasive copy writing and the best design practices, and less on the technology and scientific methods. The advent of new multivariate testing technologies, adaptive multivariate testing in particular, is significantly impacting the industry’s best practices. Although they are still important and relevant, they are no longer dominant. Using traditional best practices is a great way to initialize the CRO journey but they are by no means the final destination.

New optimization technology is consistently revealing that what works for one company may not work for another. Even more subtle, two vendors selling the exactly the same type product, optimizing the very same type of web page elements, using the same marketing ideas, might get significantly different outcomes.

That is why three simple rules below are so important for opening doors for the use of technology and creating much higher value with the conversion rate optimization.

A: Maximize the performance of existing web pages before considering a new design

One of the biggest misconceptions in conversion rate optimization business is thinking that the only way that you can get higher page conversion rates is to completely re-design your web page or a complete website. This immediately sounds like a complicated and expensive endeavor that turns off the great majority e-merchants. They think: Not now. We have no time, money, or resources to do it.

The multivariate testing technology is revealing that your existing web pages have a lot of potential for improvement. By casting a wide net and experimenting with many small, almost invisible changes, you will almost certainly find a combination of these changes that produces a great increase in conversion rate.

Take a look at the example below (for the complete case study please visit e-Loser):

These two pages look almost exactly the same. Upon first look there is nothing that will make you think that any one of them should be 39% better.

Further analysis of the importance of each variation is making this picture even more startling:

The small numbers in the Relative Importance table are showing the difference in the conversion rate between a page that has one of the variations and the control (your existing web page). As you can see in this example, none of the new variation has had any significant impact individually.

But surprisingly, a combination of several small changes compounds to produce a very significant increase in the page conversion rate. Very few marketing professionals are aware of these multivariate testing methodology characteristics.

B: Be Different

During A-B or traditional multivariate tests you had to be prepared to experience a temporary dip in conversion rate during the optimization tests as a price of discovering a version of the page that will make money for you in the long run. This was happing because of the certainty that you will test more losers than winners and hence your conversion rate will temporarily suffer.

The fear of this testing risk was preventing many companies from even trying to optimize. And those who would dare would often elect to try to minimize the risk by testing more of the same. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different result. In reality, to get great results you have to try some new and radically different ideas.

To deal with the temporary loss concerns, many vendors will either downplay its occurrence or they would try to spin it in positive way, like it was done by a recent Ektron’s white paper: “Fail faster with multivariate testing“.

The adaptive multivariate testing technology is creating a breakthrough by its ability to eliminate this risk of testing. This technology is able to adapt to visitor’s behavior in real-time. The algorithm’s training period is very short (often no longer than couple of days). After that, only page combinations that have high probability to beat the base line are tested. As result, you will see an improvement in your conversion rate during the test itself.

C: Do not turn your optimization system off

A traditional approach to conversion rate optimization is a multi-step process: design the test, run the test, verify results, and then permanently implement the winning page.

With traditional optimization technologies you could not do it differently. These products are designed to act as testing tools and to passively measure the test outcomes.

To dramatize the difference between the adaptive multivariate testing approach and traditional testing methods we like to compare the traditional solution to a thermometer.

The adaptive method on the other side acts as an active component of the website that continually adopts itself to the most current visitor behavior. Hence, to stay in the same metaphor, we compare the adaptive approach to a thermostat. Like your home thermostat that is continually managing your energy consumption, your website thermostat will continually manage your online channel ROI.

Conclusion

The goal of this article was not to minimize an importance of the experienced online marketer who is necessary for achieving great increases in the website conversion rate. Instead, we wanted to suggest an effective way of using adaptive multivariate testing technology to expand the potential of a good marketing. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/9U_LXDiYHeQ/the-best-conversion-rate-optimization-practices-are-dead-well-not-so-soon Before the advent of multivariate testing technologies, the only option for conversion rate optimization practitioners was to follow empirically proven “best practices”. Now that multivariate tests are often showing that many of the best practices are not as generally applicable as originally thought, many are questioning their validity. We think that the best practices deserve the attention but be wary of their limitations. http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=434 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:21:42 -0800

If you never did any conversion rate optimization, you need to adopt a simple practical framework. The Internet is full of these “10 best” … “7 essential” … or other adjectives used to describe the most important things you need to do to optimize your pages. In the past, consultants would use these rules to design effective websites. With the advent of testing tools, these rules are then used to design A-B (sometimes called Split Tests) or multivariate tests (rarely, done only by very few large e-commerce players).

The most popular tool for A-B testing is Google’s Website Optimizer. To see what kind of results others are getting you should visit: WhichTestWon.com or Abtests.com.

Let us make our own contribution to the best practices framework:

	Your web pages are your most valuable online real-estate. Adding a new feature and content could make sense on the element-by-element basis. For example, additional text can help your organic SEO ranking, a breadcrumb navigation can enhance user experience, product recommendations can help visitors make easier buying decision, etc.

At some point, your web pages will start to look like a Christmas tree after the holidays, which can adversely impact your conversion rates.

The reality is that you must do everything possible so that your customers can find the products they want efficiently and help them make easy purchase decisions.

However, at some point your efforts will become counter productive.

Is there a sane way of approaching this subject

After presiding to hundreds conversion rate optimization tests we can tell you with certainty that all best practices are dead. There is no general rule that can predict visitor reaction to a particular page component and even less on changes of multiple page elements at the same time.

So, do not even bother with all the articles that start with “7 best …” or “ top 10.” Such advices can work some and can completely fail for others.

What you need is a scientific approach that can give you specific answers to your specific web page and the exact set of page elements. This scientific approach is called multivariate testing. For those who have never heard of this term, multivariate testing is defined as the experimentation with multiple page elements at the same time.

Multivariate Testing Is A Scientific Approach

The reason is very simple. Each web page has its own visual signature that forces human eye to read its content in a different way. This is because our brains are wired to notice the most visible element on the page first and not to scan a web page top to bottom or left to right.

By adding or removing an element of a web page you will change its visual signature. This will then change the order in which elements are read, which can have an unpredictable impact on how this new version of the page is processed by a web visitor.

In the online business, your enemy is the very short visitor attention span. A typical reaction time is less than second or two. So, if you do not ‘hook’ your visitor quickly, he is gone and you have lost a conversion (or sale).

Be aware of A-B test flaws

One might argue that a simple A-B testing, where you will test the impact of one element at a time, will do the job. This is highly unlikely. Applying the results of the individual tests and then extending that logic to combinations of elements will only work if each element is completely independent from one another. This is rarely the case.

For example, in your A-B test you might determine that a red Add-To-Cart button is better than a blue one, and that green font color for the product price is better than a maroon color. However, after running a multivariate test of all the possible page combinations, you might find that the combination with highest conversion rate is the one that has maroon font color for price and a blue Add-To-Cart button.

Why such unexpected behavior? We already mentioned a technical answer: each combination has its own visual signature and conversion rate. Practical reasoning might be described like this: your product has a very completive price – the maroon color of your price is more visible against the blue Add-To-Cart button – as a result, the visitor is quickly ‘hooked’ to your price and the decision to buy is made more frequently.

The Usual Suspects

Here is a short list of troubled elements that should help you formalize your thinking and arrange multivariate testing:

We are sure that others can identify many other types of content or widgets that are being added to a typical web site. Our objective was to initialize your thinking so that you can apply similar testing criteria on any other web page element that your website might have.

	One would think that the days of ‘dot-com’ businesses are the distant past. Lessons learned. Dues paid. We know better today. Well, take look at the online marketing business. How is it possible that more than 10 years since the demise of ‘eye balls’ as a measure of website performance do we find that we are still stuck in the “number of visitors” paradigm?

E-Commerce Metrics: Data Overload

The issue is not about availability of website analytics data. Actually, it is the opposite. This way, online marketers are hit by mountains of non-relevant and non-actionable data.

That is why for the majority of companies, the number of web visitors is still the main KPI (key performance indicator). We all understand what that number means and thanks to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and armies of SEO consultants, we all know how to increase it (with the help of hard dollars or soft marketing actions).

On the other side, the conversion rate numbers are quietly swept under the rug. They are treated as temperature readings that nobody can control.

Well, let us break the news. Website conversion rates can be controlled and a ‘website thermostat’ already exists. Can your company afford not to use it?

A Beginning Of A New Marketing Era

The Adobe’s $1.8 B acquisition of Omniture (one of the largest web analytics and web optimization companies) marks the beginning of mainstream adoption of smart website management technology (i.e. the use of a ‘website thermostat’).

The main theme of this acquisition is that ‘Marketing is the new finance.’ The historic shift from traditional to online medium and its associated ability to collect and act on marketing data in real time is impacting the corporate marketing function in similar ways as the advancement of computer has impacted the finance industry in the 60s.

So, how should this impact your thinking and behavior?

Here is a simplistic picture of the online battlefield. On one side you have a limited number of qualified visitors (potential buyers). On the other side you have ever-increasing number of e-commerce merchants and lead generation companies competing for web visitor attention.

Getting more web visitors is increasingly hard and expensive for many companies. Just check the latest PPC numbers for your keywords. Organic SEO and social marketing are great, but not every company can earn its place on the fist page of the Google’s search.

Smart companies have already discovered that a small investment in CRO (conversion rate optimization) is producing dramatically higher ROI than the alternative investment in traffic generation.

Simple Practical Steps

CRO is not as complicated as you might think. Here is a simple 3-step framework to get you up to speed:

Step #1: Get familiar with your conversion rates

Step #2: Understand different testing methods

Step #3: Play

We believe that marketing is rapidly becoming science rather than art. With the start of the new decade you have an opportunity to enhance your online marketing playbook with the conversion rate optimization capability. This is a virtually risk free method for increasing online sales.

There seems to be a lot of noise in the Digital Marketing world at the moment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to sort out which technologies and companies can really help you achieve your goals as an eCommerce site. Can more traffic really be the endgame? Will a new site really help more people find what they want from you? Why do so many SEOs keep calling you with an offer to be on Page One of Google for the keywords of your choice?
Don’t let that distract you from things that can really make a difference to you — and in the end, unless you’re a glorified billboard on the Internet, the real difference-maker is more money. While being #1 on the search engine listings is nice, and important, it’s not the difference-maker that CRO is.

Merchandise is Ready to Go - Are You Optimized for the Holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone knows the words to the song. Pretty soon, any retail outlet you approach will be booming out holiday-cheer tunes ad nauseam. But, for the moment, let’s try to keep the urge to vomit down and think about what really matters for eCommerce — and that’s making your website the BEST POSSIBLE store window you can have. Store window, eh, you say? Yes, you’re probably right. That metaphor doesn’t really work too well any more. Frankly, people arrive at your online checkout page through a variety of sources, and the important thing for you is to INCREASE REVENUE.

Increase revenue = conversion goal. It’s that simple. So how can CRO help that number to rise? and can it really rise in time to make the holiday season more profitable for a site like yours?

I know what you’re thinking, it’s always risky to try something new when the number of visitors is highest and at the time of the year when revenues are most critical to the company “making the numbers.” Right?

So let me tell you why – or rather, three ways how CRO is going to make you more money during this holiday season.

Three Ways CRO Makes You More Money

• CRO takes variations of your page and, through the technology, rearranges them through how your visitors react to them. After a very small number of visitors, CRO converges on the best combination of those variations, making subsequent visitors MUCH MORE LIKELY to buy. That leads to an increased conversion rate while you test.
• The right CRO product is architected in a way to burn through very few visitors to begin converging, and requires no technical staff or technical intervention to work.
• You don’t need a new website, or more visitors — the technology lets these assets “sweat” more for you.

Three Things You Don’t Need in Order to Do CRO

• Glorified heat maps. Yes, it’s nice to analyze where potential customer eyes go, and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as testing everything. Get a tool that will let you.
• Someone else “best practices” imported into your eCommerce site. Why’s that? Because someone else’s best practice applied to you is the surest way to create yourself an average company. Invasive species are usually unwelcome in a new ecosystem.
• Expensive consultants. A good design person isn’t expensive, can plug the variations into the right tool, and then the test runs itself. You don’t need reports about statements of work, areas to target, etc.

Thermostats Help Regulate, Unlike Thermometers

Thermometers Provide Information - Useful Only in Context

Why the Right KPIs Don’t Just Tell, They Act

Having seen enough KPIs in enough organizations — as I am sure you have, too — I agree that it’s time to get serious about dealing with analytics. Avinash Kaushik’s recent post talks about KPIs to die for. Naturally, since Hiconversion is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) SaaS vendor, I agree with him that Conversion Rate is #1.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the agreement ends. Typically, the discussion in the market tends to take on this sort of tone. And if you frame CRO in terms of Google Website Optimizer or Omniture, you’re bound to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why do I say that? Three reasons, really:

• Google Website Optimizer is an excellent thermometer. It can tell you the temperature, but can’t actually do anything about it without expensive consulting services, lots and lots of hard-earned website traffic, and extensive technical intervention – unless testing two AND ONLY two versions of your page (A/B testing) over a long period of time and hoping that one of these two pages is a “correct guess” suits your business. And Google Website Optimizer will never actually “act” for you.
• Omniture is a wonderful analytics suite that costs a fortune in terms of license and support. It’s an expensive thermometer with a limited ability to “act”, and unless you have a large traffic profile, technically inclined staff, and analytics experts, it’s generally not going to give you the results you need. It certainly cannot be a thermostat without significant integration to other systems.
• That excludes about 95-99% of eBusinesses who could really use CRO to get more revenue, within a few short weeks, using their same website and at their same traffic levels, with minimal technical intervention or “consulting services.”

I’m not trying to turn this blog posting into a sales pitch for Hiconversion — I’m more interested in analyzing the tone of the discussion in the market, and what it really means to most eBusinesses. More importantly, I think that if we agree that Conversion Rate is the most important KPI an eBusiness can use to regulate its business, then using a thermostat and NOT a thermometer is crucial. Acting in June on temperature readings from March demonstrates the point — act on the data as you receive them, not months later.

An affordable, easy-to-set thermostat is naturally preferable, right? And a conversion rate tool that drives visitors towards the optimal “winning page combination” is very important if you don’t have the technical or analytics expertise in-house and want to keep costs down.

There aren’t many affordable Conversion Rate thermostats out there, but free thermometers can’t do what efficient, effective, and current thermostats can. Be choosy and select the one that fits your business-critical KPIs. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/g-sQV0LMHMw/increasing-conversion-is-not-reducing-bounces With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=280 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:48:55 -0700 With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog post as an example.

Conversion Rate Matters More Than How Many Bounces You Get

Frequently, I read blog postings by people that take the tone of Google Optimizer – Have You Tried It? This post raises several causes for concern in my mind. Now, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to pick on this posting — what I am doing is using it as an example for what I see as a perception that seems to be widely shared.

Why does it cause concern? I’ll give you three reasons:

• With tools like Autonomy (a.k.a. Optimost, Omniture, Adobe), Vertster, and Hiconversion leading the way in conversion rate optimization (CRO) on websites, Google Website Optimizer seems to fall into the category of “free is not cheap enough.” Of course, since Google is pervasive, it gets used by lots of websites, but considering that most only use it for A/B testing (as the above post mentions, not to pick on it but it was a post yesterday that came to my attention) and the traffic level required is extremely high, this makes it difficult to use for most websites doing business on the web today.
• Google Website Optimizer is not necessarily going to help educate the market. Take, again, yesterday’s post as a common example – the focus seems to be on traffic, and bounce rates. That feels like the tip of a very large iceberg. One might be tempted to say, “Good start.” But what is the site’s conversion rate? There’s no evidence that anyone has worked out that, for every 100 site visitors that come to the shopping cart, 3 click “purchase.” The field “Est. Conv. Rate” on the Google Website Optimizer screen in the blog post has nothing to do with that, as far as I can tell. The only evidence frequently offered has to do with reducing bounce rates. Websites are not billboards, they’re stores. The name of the game is to make money.
• Analysis is good, but it’s expensive and requires specialists. Again, if you’re not a statistician, do you really understand how multi-variate testing delivers much more impact than A/B testing? or how you have to set up the test to ensure the variations will produce reliable results? or what you’d have to be looking for in your analytics reports (and how to set those up…)? Again, Google Website Optimizer can be quite misleading when it’s in the wrong hands.

What do you think? Is “free” cheap enough? Do business think conversion rate is about how many people buy, or reducing your bounce rate? Comments welcome. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/dgUW6zQ-i2o/the-three-most-overlooked-elements-of-digital-marketing There is a new frontier in Digital Marketing that leverages the investment that has been made in the past. Having built a website, put an operational wrap around it, agreed an online marketing strategy with organizational leadership, and set forth an organic and paid traffic-driving plan … there’s still the small matter of converting those [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=231 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:33:51 -0700

Executive Summary

The three most overlooked elements of Digital Marketing, simply put, are:

• Conversion,
• Conversion, and
• Conversion.

CRO targets bottom-line results

Conversions Tie Directly to Revenue

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is focused on precisely one thing – tightly tying the money spent optimizing conversions to actual revenue achieved by the company.

Conversion

It’s easy to ignore conversion. Offline media, such as print advertisements, have begun their slow – or, in some cases, rapid – decline. However, as social media have exploded, the complexity of business has increased for many businesses. What was once simply a loosely correlated set of metrics to revenue, such as “brand awareness,” driving marketing spend, has been replaced with a myriad of key performance indicators (KPIs). The prevalence of cost-per-click (CPC), for example, is one in a long parade of metrics whose relationship with ROI is not a direct correlation. Click-through rate (CTR) is another.

Many, many marketers have started into the Digital Marketing world armed with these metrics. Other KPIs followed, too numerous to list here.

Faced with such an array of KPIs, focusing on ROI – return on investment – can somehow seem less important. CPC and CTR might be things that you’re currently tracking, but will they directly drive revenue for your business? For almost everyone, the answer is a distinct “no.”

Conversion

Adding to the fire, there are always more activities to do and more ways to explore reaching potential customers by driving traffic through unique media such as mobile search, affiliate marketing, banners, commerce and e-tail sites, digital outdoor, e-mail, and pricing promotions, just to name a few that spring to mind. Again, the proliferation of Marketing channels is astonishing in speed and breathtaking in adoption.

None of these media – which can deliver surprising traffic uplifts, used in the right business context – will guarantee additional revenue, however. The best ROI case is that one assumes that a “more relevant” set of potential customers can be reached through the right campaign in these media.

However, generally speaking, more traffic creates a linear uplift in revenue in the best case, i.e. 1,000 more visitors, 50 convert at our 5% conversion rate, and so we now have 50 more customers. In the best case.

Conversion

CRO is one of those rare things in business that offers “low-hanging fruit” (to use an overused term) in terms of additional business benefit. Most companies have not embarked on CRO previously – barriers such as complexity to execute the test, a dip in conversion rate as the test is ongoing, a desire to re-launch one’s website rather than make the existing one “sweat” more were all reasons NOT to embark upon CRO – and it offers the opportunity to get an exponential ROI, not just a linear uplift. When’s the last time a project had a believable hockey-stick revenue shape to it?

With Hiconversion’s next-generation CRO, those barriers have fallen. Testing can be done by virtually any business person that can point-and-click; conversion rate rises DURING the test; existing websites can become revenue-generation machines without the need for a risky or expensive overhaul.

Best of all, with no increase in traffic, converting just 10% more of the visitors will exponentially increase revenue – starting virtually immediately.

Conclusion

CRO is a discipline that can no longer be ignored. This “new frontier” of eCommerce has now been opened and will deliver high ROI for those that choose to embark. What’s stopping you?

Surprisingly even the largest e-commerce companies that have resources, expensive tools, and a high volume of web traffic are still running only A-B tests. When asked why, they will tell you about reasons that reveal a false understanding of what A-B Split testing can do for them.

Industry experts, analysts, and bloggers are not helping either. Often you can hear them talking about A-B and Multivariate testing in the same breath like they are talking about the same thing.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

Here is our attempt to dispel the most widespread myths and to articulate the difference between A-B split and Multivariate Testing (MVT) methods.

Myth #1 – A-B split testing is less risky

Myth #2 – A-B split testing is great for quick learning

Myth #3 – A-B split testing is best for a new designs or big changes

Myth #4 – A-B split testing is the best for big increases in conversion rate

Myth #5 – A-B split testing is much simpler to setup

Myth #6 – A-B split testing is less costly

Myth #7 – A-B split testing is the best for small to medium companies or for ‘long tail’ web pages at the big e-commerce sites

With more complex algorithms that factor in local, personal and universal search features, search rankings are not always consistent. Today’s results often depend on a user’s location, their search history and their behavior with the search results – sometimes you can see different search results for the same search terms, even on two different computers in the same location.

One question many businesses have when hunting for a search engine optimization (SEO) company is, “Will this company know us and our audience well enough to turn our web business into something profitable, worthy of our investment?” Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discern the answer before you are three months into an agreement.

Web Traffic vs. Engagement

Is the goal of SEO to get as much traffic as possible to a website? Many SEO companies will lead you to believe that more traffic is all there is to it. Granted, getting more traffic is a part of it, but more eyeballs on a web page do not necessarily mean achieving your business goals.

Look at your web analytics – specifically the keywords that brought in the majority of traffic – then evaluate the quality of this traffic over the past month or quarter. A high bounce rate and low average time on site for visits from a particular keyword can indicate one or all of these:

Let me suggest that the focus of SEO should be audience engagement, rather than traffic. According to Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, “Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” That’s pretty clear: Without specific goals, driving more traffic to your website sounds like a good option.

But if a visitor hits your site and bounces, your depth of visitor interaction is null. To truly engage a visitor requires relevance and targeted communication. So what is best for your business? I offer a different approach: using SEO to build audience engagement.

“But,” you ask, “what does that have to do with SEO?” Everything, if you want long-term customer loyalty rather than more, sort-of-qualified traffic. Loyalty is a measurable metric and often comes with SEO rewards like fabulous testimonials and links from customer sites.

At the end of the day, businesses want SEO consultants who tailor their Internet marketing directly to the bottom line by bringing valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and returning customers – rather than simply getting more traffic to the site.

About the Author

Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, founded in 2000 to provide tailored Internet marketing plans – valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and loyal customers.

Up to very recently, conversion rate optimization (CRO) was dominated by consultants who were providing the optimization solutions as a blend of empirical experience with a little bit of technology. The practitioners were relying more on the art of persuasive copy writing and the best design practices, and less on the technology and scientific methods. The advent of new multivariate testing technologies, adaptive multivariate testing in particular, is significantly impacting the industry’s best practices. Although they are still important and relevant, they are no longer dominant. Using traditional best practices is a great way to initialize the CRO journey but they are by no means the final destination.

New optimization technology is consistently revealing that what works for one company may not work for another. Even more subtle, two vendors selling the exactly the same type product, optimizing the very same type of web page elements, using the same marketing ideas, might get significantly different outcomes.

That is why three simple rules below are so important for opening doors for the use of technology and creating much higher value with the conversion rate optimization.

A: Maximize the performance of existing web pages before considering a new design

One of the biggest misconceptions in conversion rate optimization business is thinking that the only way that you can get higher page conversion rates is to completely re-design your web page or a complete website. This immediately sounds like a complicated and expensive endeavor that turns off the great majority e-merchants. They think: Not now. We have no time, money, or resources to do it.

The multivariate testing technology is revealing that your existing web pages have a lot of potential for improvement. By casting a wide net and experimenting with many small, almost invisible changes, you will almost certainly find a combination of these changes that produces a great increase in conversion rate.

Take a look at the example below (for the complete case study please visit e-Loser):

These two pages look almost exactly the same. Upon first look there is nothing that will make you think that any one of them should be 39% better.

Further analysis of the importance of each variation is making this picture even more startling:

The small numbers in the Relative Importance table are showing the difference in the conversion rate between a page that has one of the variations and the control (your existing web page). As you can see in this example, none of the new variation has had any significant impact individually.

But surprisingly, a combination of several small changes compounds to produce a very significant increase in the page conversion rate. Very few marketing professionals are aware of these multivariate testing methodology characteristics.

B: Be Different

During A-B or traditional multivariate tests you had to be prepared to experience a temporary dip in conversion rate during the optimization tests as a price of discovering a version of the page that will make money for you in the long run. This was happing because of the certainty that you will test more losers than winners and hence your conversion rate will temporarily suffer.

The fear of this testing risk was preventing many companies from even trying to optimize. And those who would dare would often elect to try to minimize the risk by testing more of the same. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different result. In reality, to get great results you have to try some new and radically different ideas.

To deal with the temporary loss concerns, many vendors will either downplay its occurrence or they would try to spin it in positive way, like it was done by a recent Ektron’s white paper: “Fail faster with multivariate testing“.

The adaptive multivariate testing technology is creating a breakthrough by its ability to eliminate this risk of testing. This technology is able to adapt to visitor’s behavior in real-time. The algorithm’s training period is very short (often no longer than couple of days). After that, only page combinations that have high probability to beat the base line are tested. As result, you will see an improvement in your conversion rate during the test itself.

C: Do not turn your optimization system off

A traditional approach to conversion rate optimization is a multi-step process: design the test, run the test, verify results, and then permanently implement the winning page.

With traditional optimization technologies you could not do it differently. These products are designed to act as testing tools and to passively measure the test outcomes.

To dramatize the difference between the adaptive multivariate testing approach and traditional testing methods we like to compare the traditional solution to a thermometer.

The adaptive method on the other side acts as an active component of the website that continually adopts itself to the most current visitor behavior. Hence, to stay in the same metaphor, we compare the adaptive approach to a thermostat. Like your home thermostat that is continually managing your energy consumption, your website thermostat will continually manage your online channel ROI.

Conclusion

The goal of this article was not to minimize an importance of the experienced online marketer who is necessary for achieving great increases in the website conversion rate. Instead, we wanted to suggest an effective way of using adaptive multivariate testing technology to expand the potential of a good marketing. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/9U_LXDiYHeQ/the-best-conversion-rate-optimization-practices-are-dead-well-not-so-soon Before the advent of multivariate testing technologies, the only option for conversion rate optimization practitioners was to follow empirically proven “best practices”. Now that multivariate tests are often showing that many of the best practices are not as generally applicable as originally thought, many are questioning their validity. We think that the best practices deserve the attention but be wary of their limitations. http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=434 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:21:42 -0800

If you never did any conversion rate optimization, you need to adopt a simple practical framework. The Internet is full of these “10 best” … “7 essential” … or other adjectives used to describe the most important things you need to do to optimize your pages. In the past, consultants would use these rules to design effective websites. With the advent of testing tools, these rules are then used to design A-B (sometimes called Split Tests) or multivariate tests (rarely, done only by very few large e-commerce players).

The most popular tool for A-B testing is Google’s Website Optimizer. To see what kind of results others are getting you should visit: WhichTestWon.com or Abtests.com.

Let us make our own contribution to the best practices framework:

	Your web pages are your most valuable online real-estate. Adding a new feature and content could make sense on the element-by-element basis. For example, additional text can help your organic SEO ranking, a breadcrumb navigation can enhance user experience, product recommendations can help visitors make easier buying decision, etc.

At some point, your web pages will start to look like a Christmas tree after the holidays, which can adversely impact your conversion rates.

The reality is that you must do everything possible so that your customers can find the products they want efficiently and help them make easy purchase decisions.

However, at some point your efforts will become counter productive.

Is there a sane way of approaching this subject

After presiding to hundreds conversion rate optimization tests we can tell you with certainty that all best practices are dead. There is no general rule that can predict visitor reaction to a particular page component and even less on changes of multiple page elements at the same time.

So, do not even bother with all the articles that start with “7 best …” or “ top 10.” Such advices can work some and can completely fail for others.

What you need is a scientific approach that can give you specific answers to your specific web page and the exact set of page elements. This scientific approach is called multivariate testing. For those who have never heard of this term, multivariate testing is defined as the experimentation with multiple page elements at the same time.

Multivariate Testing Is A Scientific Approach

The reason is very simple. Each web page has its own visual signature that forces human eye to read its content in a different way. This is because our brains are wired to notice the most visible element on the page first and not to scan a web page top to bottom or left to right.

By adding or removing an element of a web page you will change its visual signature. This will then change the order in which elements are read, which can have an unpredictable impact on how this new version of the page is processed by a web visitor.

In the online business, your enemy is the very short visitor attention span. A typical reaction time is less than second or two. So, if you do not ‘hook’ your visitor quickly, he is gone and you have lost a conversion (or sale).

Be aware of A-B test flaws

One might argue that a simple A-B testing, where you will test the impact of one element at a time, will do the job. This is highly unlikely. Applying the results of the individual tests and then extending that logic to combinations of elements will only work if each element is completely independent from one another. This is rarely the case.

For example, in your A-B test you might determine that a red Add-To-Cart button is better than a blue one, and that green font color for the product price is better than a maroon color. However, after running a multivariate test of all the possible page combinations, you might find that the combination with highest conversion rate is the one that has maroon font color for price and a blue Add-To-Cart button.

Why such unexpected behavior? We already mentioned a technical answer: each combination has its own visual signature and conversion rate. Practical reasoning might be described like this: your product has a very completive price – the maroon color of your price is more visible against the blue Add-To-Cart button – as a result, the visitor is quickly ‘hooked’ to your price and the decision to buy is made more frequently.

The Usual Suspects

Here is a short list of troubled elements that should help you formalize your thinking and arrange multivariate testing:

We are sure that others can identify many other types of content or widgets that are being added to a typical web site. Our objective was to initialize your thinking so that you can apply similar testing criteria on any other web page element that your website might have.

	One would think that the days of ‘dot-com’ businesses are the distant past. Lessons learned. Dues paid. We know better today. Well, take look at the online marketing business. How is it possible that more than 10 years since the demise of ‘eye balls’ as a measure of website performance do we find that we are still stuck in the “number of visitors” paradigm?

E-Commerce Metrics: Data Overload

The issue is not about availability of website analytics data. Actually, it is the opposite. This way, online marketers are hit by mountains of non-relevant and non-actionable data.

That is why for the majority of companies, the number of web visitors is still the main KPI (key performance indicator). We all understand what that number means and thanks to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and armies of SEO consultants, we all know how to increase it (with the help of hard dollars or soft marketing actions).

On the other side, the conversion rate numbers are quietly swept under the rug. They are treated as temperature readings that nobody can control.

Well, let us break the news. Website conversion rates can be controlled and a ‘website thermostat’ already exists. Can your company afford not to use it?

A Beginning Of A New Marketing Era

The Adobe’s $1.8 B acquisition of Omniture (one of the largest web analytics and web optimization companies) marks the beginning of mainstream adoption of smart website management technology (i.e. the use of a ‘website thermostat’).

The main theme of this acquisition is that ‘Marketing is the new finance.’ The historic shift from traditional to online medium and its associated ability to collect and act on marketing data in real time is impacting the corporate marketing function in similar ways as the advancement of computer has impacted the finance industry in the 60s.

So, how should this impact your thinking and behavior?

Here is a simplistic picture of the online battlefield. On one side you have a limited number of qualified visitors (potential buyers). On the other side you have ever-increasing number of e-commerce merchants and lead generation companies competing for web visitor attention.

Getting more web visitors is increasingly hard and expensive for many companies. Just check the latest PPC numbers for your keywords. Organic SEO and social marketing are great, but not every company can earn its place on the fist page of the Google’s search.

Smart companies have already discovered that a small investment in CRO (conversion rate optimization) is producing dramatically higher ROI than the alternative investment in traffic generation.

Simple Practical Steps

CRO is not as complicated as you might think. Here is a simple 3-step framework to get you up to speed:

Step #1: Get familiar with your conversion rates

Step #2: Understand different testing methods

Step #3: Play

We believe that marketing is rapidly becoming science rather than art. With the start of the new decade you have an opportunity to enhance your online marketing playbook with the conversion rate optimization capability. This is a virtually risk free method for increasing online sales.

There seems to be a lot of noise in the Digital Marketing world at the moment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to sort out which technologies and companies can really help you achieve your goals as an eCommerce site. Can more traffic really be the endgame? Will a new site really help more people find what they want from you? Why do so many SEOs keep calling you with an offer to be on Page One of Google for the keywords of your choice?
Don’t let that distract you from things that can really make a difference to you — and in the end, unless you’re a glorified billboard on the Internet, the real difference-maker is more money. While being #1 on the search engine listings is nice, and important, it’s not the difference-maker that CRO is.

Merchandise is Ready to Go - Are You Optimized for the Holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone knows the words to the song. Pretty soon, any retail outlet you approach will be booming out holiday-cheer tunes ad nauseam. But, for the moment, let’s try to keep the urge to vomit down and think about what really matters for eCommerce — and that’s making your website the BEST POSSIBLE store window you can have. Store window, eh, you say? Yes, you’re probably right. That metaphor doesn’t really work too well any more. Frankly, people arrive at your online checkout page through a variety of sources, and the important thing for you is to INCREASE REVENUE.

Increase revenue = conversion goal. It’s that simple. So how can CRO help that number to rise? and can it really rise in time to make the holiday season more profitable for a site like yours?

I know what you’re thinking, it’s always risky to try something new when the number of visitors is highest and at the time of the year when revenues are most critical to the company “making the numbers.” Right?

So let me tell you why – or rather, three ways how CRO is going to make you more money during this holiday season.

Three Ways CRO Makes You More Money

• CRO takes variations of your page and, through the technology, rearranges them through how your visitors react to them. After a very small number of visitors, CRO converges on the best combination of those variations, making subsequent visitors MUCH MORE LIKELY to buy. That leads to an increased conversion rate while you test.
• The right CRO product is architected in a way to burn through very few visitors to begin converging, and requires no technical staff or technical intervention to work.
• You don’t need a new website, or more visitors — the technology lets these assets “sweat” more for you.

Three Things You Don’t Need in Order to Do CRO

• Glorified heat maps. Yes, it’s nice to analyze where potential customer eyes go, and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as testing everything. Get a tool that will let you.
• Someone else “best practices” imported into your eCommerce site. Why’s that? Because someone else’s best practice applied to you is the surest way to create yourself an average company. Invasive species are usually unwelcome in a new ecosystem.
• Expensive consultants. A good design person isn’t expensive, can plug the variations into the right tool, and then the test runs itself. You don’t need reports about statements of work, areas to target, etc.

Thermostats Help Regulate, Unlike Thermometers

Thermometers Provide Information - Useful Only in Context

Why the Right KPIs Don’t Just Tell, They Act

Having seen enough KPIs in enough organizations — as I am sure you have, too — I agree that it’s time to get serious about dealing with analytics. Avinash Kaushik’s recent post talks about KPIs to die for. Naturally, since Hiconversion is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) SaaS vendor, I agree with him that Conversion Rate is #1.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the agreement ends. Typically, the discussion in the market tends to take on this sort of tone. And if you frame CRO in terms of Google Website Optimizer or Omniture, you’re bound to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why do I say that? Three reasons, really:

• Google Website Optimizer is an excellent thermometer. It can tell you the temperature, but can’t actually do anything about it without expensive consulting services, lots and lots of hard-earned website traffic, and extensive technical intervention – unless testing two AND ONLY two versions of your page (A/B testing) over a long period of time and hoping that one of these two pages is a “correct guess” suits your business. And Google Website Optimizer will never actually “act” for you.
• Omniture is a wonderful analytics suite that costs a fortune in terms of license and support. It’s an expensive thermometer with a limited ability to “act”, and unless you have a large traffic profile, technically inclined staff, and analytics experts, it’s generally not going to give you the results you need. It certainly cannot be a thermostat without significant integration to other systems.
• That excludes about 95-99% of eBusinesses who could really use CRO to get more revenue, within a few short weeks, using their same website and at their same traffic levels, with minimal technical intervention or “consulting services.”

I’m not trying to turn this blog posting into a sales pitch for Hiconversion — I’m more interested in analyzing the tone of the discussion in the market, and what it really means to most eBusinesses. More importantly, I think that if we agree that Conversion Rate is the most important KPI an eBusiness can use to regulate its business, then using a thermostat and NOT a thermometer is crucial. Acting in June on temperature readings from March demonstrates the point — act on the data as you receive them, not months later.

An affordable, easy-to-set thermostat is naturally preferable, right? And a conversion rate tool that drives visitors towards the optimal “winning page combination” is very important if you don’t have the technical or analytics expertise in-house and want to keep costs down.

There aren’t many affordable Conversion Rate thermostats out there, but free thermometers can’t do what efficient, effective, and current thermostats can. Be choosy and select the one that fits your business-critical KPIs. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/g-sQV0LMHMw/increasing-conversion-is-not-reducing-bounces With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=280 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:48:55 -0700 With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog post as an example.

Conversion Rate Matters More Than How Many Bounces You Get

Frequently, I read blog postings by people that take the tone of Google Optimizer – Have You Tried It? This post raises several causes for concern in my mind. Now, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to pick on this posting — what I am doing is using it as an example for what I see as a perception that seems to be widely shared.

Why does it cause concern? I’ll give you three reasons:

• With tools like Autonomy (a.k.a. Optimost, Omniture, Adobe), Vertster, and Hiconversion leading the way in conversion rate optimization (CRO) on websites, Google Website Optimizer seems to fall into the category of “free is not cheap enough.” Of course, since Google is pervasive, it gets used by lots of websites, but considering that most only use it for A/B testing (as the above post mentions, not to pick on it but it was a post yesterday that came to my attention) and the traffic level required is extremely high, this makes it difficult to use for most websites doing business on the web today.
• Google Website Optimizer is not necessarily going to help educate the market. Take, again, yesterday’s post as a common example – the focus seems to be on traffic, and bounce rates. That feels like the tip of a very large iceberg. One might be tempted to say, “Good start.” But what is the site’s conversion rate? There’s no evidence that anyone has worked out that, for every 100 site visitors that come to the shopping cart, 3 click “purchase.” The field “Est. Conv. Rate” on the Google Website Optimizer screen in the blog post has nothing to do with that, as far as I can tell. The only evidence frequently offered has to do with reducing bounce rates. Websites are not billboards, they’re stores. The name of the game is to make money.
• Analysis is good, but it’s expensive and requires specialists. Again, if you’re not a statistician, do you really understand how multi-variate testing delivers much more impact than A/B testing? or how you have to set up the test to ensure the variations will produce reliable results? or what you’d have to be looking for in your analytics reports (and how to set those up…)? Again, Google Website Optimizer can be quite misleading when it’s in the wrong hands.

What do you think? Is “free” cheap enough? Do business think conversion rate is about how many people buy, or reducing your bounce rate? Comments welcome. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/dgUW6zQ-i2o/the-three-most-overlooked-elements-of-digital-marketing There is a new frontier in Digital Marketing that leverages the investment that has been made in the past. Having built a website, put an operational wrap around it, agreed an online marketing strategy with organizational leadership, and set forth an organic and paid traffic-driving plan … there’s still the small matter of converting those [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=231 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:33:51 -0700

Executive Summary

The three most overlooked elements of Digital Marketing, simply put, are:

• Conversion,
• Conversion, and
• Conversion.

CRO targets bottom-line results

Conversions Tie Directly to Revenue

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is focused on precisely one thing – tightly tying the money spent optimizing conversions to actual revenue achieved by the company.

Conversion

It’s easy to ignore conversion. Offline media, such as print advertisements, have begun their slow – or, in some cases, rapid – decline. However, as social media have exploded, the complexity of business has increased for many businesses. What was once simply a loosely correlated set of metrics to revenue, such as “brand awareness,” driving marketing spend, has been replaced with a myriad of key performance indicators (KPIs). The prevalence of cost-per-click (CPC), for example, is one in a long parade of metrics whose relationship with ROI is not a direct correlation. Click-through rate (CTR) is another.

Many, many marketers have started into the Digital Marketing world armed with these metrics. Other KPIs followed, too numerous to list here.

Faced with such an array of KPIs, focusing on ROI – return on investment – can somehow seem less important. CPC and CTR might be things that you’re currently tracking, but will they directly drive revenue for your business? For almost everyone, the answer is a distinct “no.”

Conversion

Adding to the fire, there are always more activities to do and more ways to explore reaching potential customers by driving traffic through unique media such as mobile search, affiliate marketing, banners, commerce and e-tail sites, digital outdoor, e-mail, and pricing promotions, just to name a few that spring to mind. Again, the proliferation of Marketing channels is astonishing in speed and breathtaking in adoption.

None of these media – which can deliver surprising traffic uplifts, used in the right business context – will guarantee additional revenue, however. The best ROI case is that one assumes that a “more relevant” set of potential customers can be reached through the right campaign in these media.

However, generally speaking, more traffic creates a linear uplift in revenue in the best case, i.e. 1,000 more visitors, 50 convert at our 5% conversion rate, and so we now have 50 more customers. In the best case.

Conversion

CRO is one of those rare things in business that offers “low-hanging fruit” (to use an overused term) in terms of additional business benefit. Most companies have not embarked on CRO previously – barriers such as complexity to execute the test, a dip in conversion rate as the test is ongoing, a desire to re-launch one’s website rather than make the existing one “sweat” more were all reasons NOT to embark upon CRO – and it offers the opportunity to get an exponential ROI, not just a linear uplift. When’s the last time a project had a believable hockey-stick revenue shape to it?

With Hiconversion’s next-generation CRO, those barriers have fallen. Testing can be done by virtually any business person that can point-and-click; conversion rate rises DURING the test; existing websites can become revenue-generation machines without the need for a risky or expensive overhaul.

Best of all, with no increase in traffic, converting just 10% more of the visitors will exponentially increase revenue – starting virtually immediately.

Conclusion

CRO is a discipline that can no longer be ignored. This “new frontier” of eCommerce has now been opened and will deliver high ROI for those that choose to embark. What’s stopping you?

Surprisingly even the largest e-commerce companies that have resources, expensive tools, and a high volume of web traffic are still running only A-B tests. When asked why, they will tell you about reasons that reveal a false understanding of what A-B Split testing can do for them.

Industry experts, analysts, and bloggers are not helping either. Often you can hear them talking about A-B and Multivariate testing in the same breath like they are talking about the same thing.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

Here is our attempt to dispel the most widespread myths and to articulate the difference between A-B split and Multivariate Testing (MVT) methods.

Myth #1 – A-B split testing is less risky

Myth #2 – A-B split testing is great for quick learning

Myth #3 – A-B split testing is best for a new designs or big changes

Myth #4 – A-B split testing is the best for big increases in conversion rate

Myth #5 – A-B split testing is much simpler to setup

Myth #6 – A-B split testing is less costly

Myth #7 – A-B split testing is the best for small to medium companies or for ‘long tail’ web pages at the big e-commerce sites

With more complex algorithms that factor in local, personal and universal search features, search rankings are not always consistent. Today’s results often depend on a user’s location, their search history and their behavior with the search results – sometimes you can see different search results for the same search terms, even on two different computers in the same location.

One question many businesses have when hunting for a search engine optimization (SEO) company is, “Will this company know us and our audience well enough to turn our web business into something profitable, worthy of our investment?” Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discern the answer before you are three months into an agreement.

Web Traffic vs. Engagement

Is the goal of SEO to get as much traffic as possible to a website? Many SEO companies will lead you to believe that more traffic is all there is to it. Granted, getting more traffic is a part of it, but more eyeballs on a web page do not necessarily mean achieving your business goals.

Look at your web analytics – specifically the keywords that brought in the majority of traffic – then evaluate the quality of this traffic over the past month or quarter. A high bounce rate and low average time on site for visits from a particular keyword can indicate one or all of these:

Let me suggest that the focus of SEO should be audience engagement, rather than traffic. According to Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, “Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” That’s pretty clear: Without specific goals, driving more traffic to your website sounds like a good option.

But if a visitor hits your site and bounces, your depth of visitor interaction is null. To truly engage a visitor requires relevance and targeted communication. So what is best for your business? I offer a different approach: using SEO to build audience engagement.

“But,” you ask, “what does that have to do with SEO?” Everything, if you want long-term customer loyalty rather than more, sort-of-qualified traffic. Loyalty is a measurable metric and often comes with SEO rewards like fabulous testimonials and links from customer sites.

At the end of the day, businesses want SEO consultants who tailor their Internet marketing directly to the bottom line by bringing valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and returning customers – rather than simply getting more traffic to the site.

About the Author

Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, founded in 2000 to provide tailored Internet marketing plans – valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and loyal customers.

Up to very recently, conversion rate optimization (CRO) was dominated by consultants who were providing the optimization solutions as a blend of empirical experience with a little bit of technology. The practitioners were relying more on the art of persuasive copy writing and the best design practices, and less on the technology and scientific methods. The advent of new multivariate testing technologies, adaptive multivariate testing in particular, is significantly impacting the industry’s best practices. Although they are still important and relevant, they are no longer dominant. Using traditional best practices is a great way to initialize the CRO journey but they are by no means the final destination.

New optimization technology is consistently revealing that what works for one company may not work for another. Even more subtle, two vendors selling the exactly the same type product, optimizing the very same type of web page elements, using the same marketing ideas, might get significantly different outcomes.

That is why three simple rules below are so important for opening doors for the use of technology and creating much higher value with the conversion rate optimization.

A: Maximize the performance of existing web pages before considering a new design

One of the biggest misconceptions in conversion rate optimization business is thinking that the only way that you can get higher page conversion rates is to completely re-design your web page or a complete website. This immediately sounds like a complicated and expensive endeavor that turns off the great majority e-merchants. They think: Not now. We have no time, money, or resources to do it.

The multivariate testing technology is revealing that your existing web pages have a lot of potential for improvement. By casting a wide net and experimenting with many small, almost invisible changes, you will almost certainly find a combination of these changes that produces a great increase in conversion rate.

Take a look at the example below (for the complete case study please visit e-Loser):

These two pages look almost exactly the same. Upon first look there is nothing that will make you think that any one of them should be 39% better.

Further analysis of the importance of each variation is making this picture even more startling:

The small numbers in the Relative Importance table are showing the difference in the conversion rate between a page that has one of the variations and the control (your existing web page). As you can see in this example, none of the new variation has had any significant impact individually.

But surprisingly, a combination of several small changes compounds to produce a very significant increase in the page conversion rate. Very few marketing professionals are aware of these multivariate testing methodology characteristics.

B: Be Different

During A-B or traditional multivariate tests you had to be prepared to experience a temporary dip in conversion rate during the optimization tests as a price of discovering a version of the page that will make money for you in the long run. This was happing because of the certainty that you will test more losers than winners and hence your conversion rate will temporarily suffer.

The fear of this testing risk was preventing many companies from even trying to optimize. And those who would dare would often elect to try to minimize the risk by testing more of the same. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different result. In reality, to get great results you have to try some new and radically different ideas.

To deal with the temporary loss concerns, many vendors will either downplay its occurrence or they would try to spin it in positive way, like it was done by a recent Ektron’s white paper: “Fail faster with multivariate testing“.

The adaptive multivariate testing technology is creating a breakthrough by its ability to eliminate this risk of testing. This technology is able to adapt to visitor’s behavior in real-time. The algorithm’s training period is very short (often no longer than couple of days). After that, only page combinations that have high probability to beat the base line are tested. As result, you will see an improvement in your conversion rate during the test itself.

C: Do not turn your optimization system off

A traditional approach to conversion rate optimization is a multi-step process: design the test, run the test, verify results, and then permanently implement the winning page.

With traditional optimization technologies you could not do it differently. These products are designed to act as testing tools and to passively measure the test outcomes.

To dramatize the difference between the adaptive multivariate testing approach and traditional testing methods we like to compare the traditional solution to a thermometer.

The adaptive method on the other side acts as an active component of the website that continually adopts itself to the most current visitor behavior. Hence, to stay in the same metaphor, we compare the adaptive approach to a thermostat. Like your home thermostat that is continually managing your energy consumption, your website thermostat will continually manage your online channel ROI.

Conclusion

The goal of this article was not to minimize an importance of the experienced online marketer who is necessary for achieving great increases in the website conversion rate. Instead, we wanted to suggest an effective way of using adaptive multivariate testing technology to expand the potential of a good marketing. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/9U_LXDiYHeQ/the-best-conversion-rate-optimization-practices-are-dead-well-not-so-soon Before the advent of multivariate testing technologies, the only option for conversion rate optimization practitioners was to follow empirically proven “best practices”. Now that multivariate tests are often showing that many of the best practices are not as generally applicable as originally thought, many are questioning their validity. We think that the best practices deserve the attention but be wary of their limitations. http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=434 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:21:42 -0800

If you never did any conversion rate optimization, you need to adopt a simple practical framework. The Internet is full of these “10 best” … “7 essential” … or other adjectives used to describe the most important things you need to do to optimize your pages. In the past, consultants would use these rules to design effective websites. With the advent of testing tools, these rules are then used to design A-B (sometimes called Split Tests) or multivariate tests (rarely, done only by very few large e-commerce players).

The most popular tool for A-B testing is Google’s Website Optimizer. To see what kind of results others are getting you should visit: WhichTestWon.com or Abtests.com.

Let us make our own contribution to the best practices framework:

	Your web pages are your most valuable online real-estate. Adding a new feature and content could make sense on the element-by-element basis. For example, additional text can help your organic SEO ranking, a breadcrumb navigation can enhance user experience, product recommendations can help visitors make easier buying decision, etc.

At some point, your web pages will start to look like a Christmas tree after the holidays, which can adversely impact your conversion rates.

The reality is that you must do everything possible so that your customers can find the products they want efficiently and help them make easy purchase decisions.

However, at some point your efforts will become counter productive.

Is there a sane way of approaching this subject

After presiding to hundreds conversion rate optimization tests we can tell you with certainty that all best practices are dead. There is no general rule that can predict visitor reaction to a particular page component and even less on changes of multiple page elements at the same time.

So, do not even bother with all the articles that start with “7 best …” or “ top 10.” Such advices can work some and can completely fail for others.

What you need is a scientific approach that can give you specific answers to your specific web page and the exact set of page elements. This scientific approach is called multivariate testing. For those who have never heard of this term, multivariate testing is defined as the experimentation with multiple page elements at the same time.

Multivariate Testing Is A Scientific Approach

The reason is very simple. Each web page has its own visual signature that forces human eye to read its content in a different way. This is because our brains are wired to notice the most visible element on the page first and not to scan a web page top to bottom or left to right.

By adding or removing an element of a web page you will change its visual signature. This will then change the order in which elements are read, which can have an unpredictable impact on how this new version of the page is processed by a web visitor.

In the online business, your enemy is the very short visitor attention span. A typical reaction time is less than second or two. So, if you do not ‘hook’ your visitor quickly, he is gone and you have lost a conversion (or sale).

Be aware of A-B test flaws

One might argue that a simple A-B testing, where you will test the impact of one element at a time, will do the job. This is highly unlikely. Applying the results of the individual tests and then extending that logic to combinations of elements will only work if each element is completely independent from one another. This is rarely the case.

For example, in your A-B test you might determine that a red Add-To-Cart button is better than a blue one, and that green font color for the product price is better than a maroon color. However, after running a multivariate test of all the possible page combinations, you might find that the combination with highest conversion rate is the one that has maroon font color for price and a blue Add-To-Cart button.

Why such unexpected behavior? We already mentioned a technical answer: each combination has its own visual signature and conversion rate. Practical reasoning might be described like this: your product has a very completive price – the maroon color of your price is more visible against the blue Add-To-Cart button – as a result, the visitor is quickly ‘hooked’ to your price and the decision to buy is made more frequently.

The Usual Suspects

Here is a short list of troubled elements that should help you formalize your thinking and arrange multivariate testing:

We are sure that others can identify many other types of content or widgets that are being added to a typical web site. Our objective was to initialize your thinking so that you can apply similar testing criteria on any other web page element that your website might have.

	One would think that the days of ‘dot-com’ businesses are the distant past. Lessons learned. Dues paid. We know better today. Well, take look at the online marketing business. How is it possible that more than 10 years since the demise of ‘eye balls’ as a measure of website performance do we find that we are still stuck in the “number of visitors” paradigm?

E-Commerce Metrics: Data Overload

The issue is not about availability of website analytics data. Actually, it is the opposite. This way, online marketers are hit by mountains of non-relevant and non-actionable data.

That is why for the majority of companies, the number of web visitors is still the main KPI (key performance indicator). We all understand what that number means and thanks to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and armies of SEO consultants, we all know how to increase it (with the help of hard dollars or soft marketing actions).

On the other side, the conversion rate numbers are quietly swept under the rug. They are treated as temperature readings that nobody can control.

Well, let us break the news. Website conversion rates can be controlled and a ‘website thermostat’ already exists. Can your company afford not to use it?

A Beginning Of A New Marketing Era

The Adobe’s $1.8 B acquisition of Omniture (one of the largest web analytics and web optimization companies) marks the beginning of mainstream adoption of smart website management technology (i.e. the use of a ‘website thermostat’).

The main theme of this acquisition is that ‘Marketing is the new finance.’ The historic shift from traditional to online medium and its associated ability to collect and act on marketing data in real time is impacting the corporate marketing function in similar ways as the advancement of computer has impacted the finance industry in the 60s.

So, how should this impact your thinking and behavior?

Here is a simplistic picture of the online battlefield. On one side you have a limited number of qualified visitors (potential buyers). On the other side you have ever-increasing number of e-commerce merchants and lead generation companies competing for web visitor attention.

Getting more web visitors is increasingly hard and expensive for many companies. Just check the latest PPC numbers for your keywords. Organic SEO and social marketing are great, but not every company can earn its place on the fist page of the Google’s search.

Smart companies have already discovered that a small investment in CRO (conversion rate optimization) is producing dramatically higher ROI than the alternative investment in traffic generation.

Simple Practical Steps

CRO is not as complicated as you might think. Here is a simple 3-step framework to get you up to speed:

Step #1: Get familiar with your conversion rates

Step #2: Understand different testing methods

Step #3: Play

We believe that marketing is rapidly becoming science rather than art. With the start of the new decade you have an opportunity to enhance your online marketing playbook with the conversion rate optimization capability. This is a virtually risk free method for increasing online sales.

There seems to be a lot of noise in the Digital Marketing world at the moment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to sort out which technologies and companies can really help you achieve your goals as an eCommerce site. Can more traffic really be the endgame? Will a new site really help more people find what they want from you? Why do so many SEOs keep calling you with an offer to be on Page One of Google for the keywords of your choice?
Don’t let that distract you from things that can really make a difference to you — and in the end, unless you’re a glorified billboard on the Internet, the real difference-maker is more money. While being #1 on the search engine listings is nice, and important, it’s not the difference-maker that CRO is.

Merchandise is Ready to Go - Are You Optimized for the Holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone knows the words to the song. Pretty soon, any retail outlet you approach will be booming out holiday-cheer tunes ad nauseam. But, for the moment, let’s try to keep the urge to vomit down and think about what really matters for eCommerce — and that’s making your website the BEST POSSIBLE store window you can have. Store window, eh, you say? Yes, you’re probably right. That metaphor doesn’t really work too well any more. Frankly, people arrive at your online checkout page through a variety of sources, and the important thing for you is to INCREASE REVENUE.

Increase revenue = conversion goal. It’s that simple. So how can CRO help that number to rise? and can it really rise in time to make the holiday season more profitable for a site like yours?

I know what you’re thinking, it’s always risky to try something new when the number of visitors is highest and at the time of the year when revenues are most critical to the company “making the numbers.” Right?

So let me tell you why – or rather, three ways how CRO is going to make you more money during this holiday season.

Three Ways CRO Makes You More Money

• CRO takes variations of your page and, through the technology, rearranges them through how your visitors react to them. After a very small number of visitors, CRO converges on the best combination of those variations, making subsequent visitors MUCH MORE LIKELY to buy. That leads to an increased conversion rate while you test.
• The right CRO product is architected in a way to burn through very few visitors to begin converging, and requires no technical staff or technical intervention to work.
• You don’t need a new website, or more visitors — the technology lets these assets “sweat” more for you.

Three Things You Don’t Need in Order to Do CRO

• Glorified heat maps. Yes, it’s nice to analyze where potential customer eyes go, and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as testing everything. Get a tool that will let you.
• Someone else “best practices” imported into your eCommerce site. Why’s that? Because someone else’s best practice applied to you is the surest way to create yourself an average company. Invasive species are usually unwelcome in a new ecosystem.
• Expensive consultants. A good design person isn’t expensive, can plug the variations into the right tool, and then the test runs itself. You don’t need reports about statements of work, areas to target, etc.

Thermostats Help Regulate, Unlike Thermometers

Thermometers Provide Information - Useful Only in Context

Why the Right KPIs Don’t Just Tell, They Act

Having seen enough KPIs in enough organizations — as I am sure you have, too — I agree that it’s time to get serious about dealing with analytics. Avinash Kaushik’s recent post talks about KPIs to die for. Naturally, since Hiconversion is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) SaaS vendor, I agree with him that Conversion Rate is #1.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the agreement ends. Typically, the discussion in the market tends to take on this sort of tone. And if you frame CRO in terms of Google Website Optimizer or Omniture, you’re bound to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why do I say that? Three reasons, really:

• Google Website Optimizer is an excellent thermometer. It can tell you the temperature, but can’t actually do anything about it without expensive consulting services, lots and lots of hard-earned website traffic, and extensive technical intervention – unless testing two AND ONLY two versions of your page (A/B testing) over a long period of time and hoping that one of these two pages is a “correct guess” suits your business. And Google Website Optimizer will never actually “act” for you.
• Omniture is a wonderful analytics suite that costs a fortune in terms of license and support. It’s an expensive thermometer with a limited ability to “act”, and unless you have a large traffic profile, technically inclined staff, and analytics experts, it’s generally not going to give you the results you need. It certainly cannot be a thermostat without significant integration to other systems.
• That excludes about 95-99% of eBusinesses who could really use CRO to get more revenue, within a few short weeks, using their same website and at their same traffic levels, with minimal technical intervention or “consulting services.”

I’m not trying to turn this blog posting into a sales pitch for Hiconversion — I’m more interested in analyzing the tone of the discussion in the market, and what it really means to most eBusinesses. More importantly, I think that if we agree that Conversion Rate is the most important KPI an eBusiness can use to regulate its business, then using a thermostat and NOT a thermometer is crucial. Acting in June on temperature readings from March demonstrates the point — act on the data as you receive them, not months later.

An affordable, easy-to-set thermostat is naturally preferable, right? And a conversion rate tool that drives visitors towards the optimal “winning page combination” is very important if you don’t have the technical or analytics expertise in-house and want to keep costs down.

There aren’t many affordable Conversion Rate thermostats out there, but free thermometers can’t do what efficient, effective, and current thermostats can. Be choosy and select the one that fits your business-critical KPIs. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/g-sQV0LMHMw/increasing-conversion-is-not-reducing-bounces With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=280 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:48:55 -0700 With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog post as an example.

Conversion Rate Matters More Than How Many Bounces You Get

Frequently, I read blog postings by people that take the tone of Google Optimizer – Have You Tried It? This post raises several causes for concern in my mind. Now, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to pick on this posting — what I am doing is using it as an example for what I see as a perception that seems to be widely shared.

Why does it cause concern? I’ll give you three reasons:

• With tools like Autonomy (a.k.a. Optimost, Omniture, Adobe), Vertster, and Hiconversion leading the way in conversion rate optimization (CRO) on websites, Google Website Optimizer seems to fall into the category of “free is not cheap enough.” Of course, since Google is pervasive, it gets used by lots of websites, but considering that most only use it for A/B testing (as the above post mentions, not to pick on it but it was a post yesterday that came to my attention) and the traffic level required is extremely high, this makes it difficult to use for most websites doing business on the web today.
• Google Website Optimizer is not necessarily going to help educate the market. Take, again, yesterday’s post as a common example – the focus seems to be on traffic, and bounce rates. That feels like the tip of a very large iceberg. One might be tempted to say, “Good start.” But what is the site’s conversion rate? There’s no evidence that anyone has worked out that, for every 100 site visitors that come to the shopping cart, 3 click “purchase.” The field “Est. Conv. Rate” on the Google Website Optimizer screen in the blog post has nothing to do with that, as far as I can tell. The only evidence frequently offered has to do with reducing bounce rates. Websites are not billboards, they’re stores. The name of the game is to make money.
• Analysis is good, but it’s expensive and requires specialists. Again, if you’re not a statistician, do you really understand how multi-variate testing delivers much more impact than A/B testing? or how you have to set up the test to ensure the variations will produce reliable results? or what you’d have to be looking for in your analytics reports (and how to set those up…)? Again, Google Website Optimizer can be quite misleading when it’s in the wrong hands.

What do you think? Is “free” cheap enough? Do business think conversion rate is about how many people buy, or reducing your bounce rate? Comments welcome. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/dgUW6zQ-i2o/the-three-most-overlooked-elements-of-digital-marketing There is a new frontier in Digital Marketing that leverages the investment that has been made in the past. Having built a website, put an operational wrap around it, agreed an online marketing strategy with organizational leadership, and set forth an organic and paid traffic-driving plan … there’s still the small matter of converting those [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=231 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:33:51 -0700

Executive Summary

The three most overlooked elements of Digital Marketing, simply put, are:

• Conversion,
• Conversion, and
• Conversion.

CRO targets bottom-line results

Conversions Tie Directly to Revenue

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is focused on precisely one thing – tightly tying the money spent optimizing conversions to actual revenue achieved by the company.

Conversion

It’s easy to ignore conversion. Offline media, such as print advertisements, have begun their slow – or, in some cases, rapid – decline. However, as social media have exploded, the complexity of business has increased for many businesses. What was once simply a loosely correlated set of metrics to revenue, such as “brand awareness,” driving marketing spend, has been replaced with a myriad of key performance indicators (KPIs). The prevalence of cost-per-click (CPC), for example, is one in a long parade of metrics whose relationship with ROI is not a direct correlation. Click-through rate (CTR) is another.

Many, many marketers have started into the Digital Marketing world armed with these metrics. Other KPIs followed, too numerous to list here.

Faced with such an array of KPIs, focusing on ROI – return on investment – can somehow seem less important. CPC and CTR might be things that you’re currently tracking, but will they directly drive revenue for your business? For almost everyone, the answer is a distinct “no.”

Conversion

Adding to the fire, there are always more activities to do and more ways to explore reaching potential customers by driving traffic through unique media such as mobile search, affiliate marketing, banners, commerce and e-tail sites, digital outdoor, e-mail, and pricing promotions, just to name a few that spring to mind. Again, the proliferation of Marketing channels is astonishing in speed and breathtaking in adoption.

None of these media – which can deliver surprising traffic uplifts, used in the right business context – will guarantee additional revenue, however. The best ROI case is that one assumes that a “more relevant” set of potential customers can be reached through the right campaign in these media.

However, generally speaking, more traffic creates a linear uplift in revenue in the best case, i.e. 1,000 more visitors, 50 convert at our 5% conversion rate, and so we now have 50 more customers. In the best case.

Conversion

CRO is one of those rare things in business that offers “low-hanging fruit” (to use an overused term) in terms of additional business benefit. Most companies have not embarked on CRO previously – barriers such as complexity to execute the test, a dip in conversion rate as the test is ongoing, a desire to re-launch one’s website rather than make the existing one “sweat” more were all reasons NOT to embark upon CRO – and it offers the opportunity to get an exponential ROI, not just a linear uplift. When’s the last time a project had a believable hockey-stick revenue shape to it?

With Hiconversion’s next-generation CRO, those barriers have fallen. Testing can be done by virtually any business person that can point-and-click; conversion rate rises DURING the test; existing websites can become revenue-generation machines without the need for a risky or expensive overhaul.

Best of all, with no increase in traffic, converting just 10% more of the visitors will exponentially increase revenue – starting virtually immediately.

Conclusion

CRO is a discipline that can no longer be ignored. This “new frontier” of eCommerce has now been opened and will deliver high ROI for those that choose to embark. What’s stopping you?

Surprisingly even the largest e-commerce companies that have resources, expensive tools, and a high volume of web traffic are still running only A-B tests. When asked why, they will tell you about reasons that reveal a false understanding of what A-B Split testing can do for them.

Industry experts, analysts, and bloggers are not helping either. Often you can hear them talking about A-B and Multivariate testing in the same breath like they are talking about the same thing.

The truth couldn’t be more different.

Here is our attempt to dispel the most widespread myths and to articulate the difference between A-B split and Multivariate Testing (MVT) methods.

Myth #1 – A-B split testing is less risky

Myth #2 – A-B split testing is great for quick learning

Myth #3 – A-B split testing is best for a new designs or big changes

Myth #4 – A-B split testing is the best for big increases in conversion rate

Myth #5 – A-B split testing is much simpler to setup

Myth #6 – A-B split testing is less costly

Myth #7 – A-B split testing is the best for small to medium companies or for ‘long tail’ web pages at the big e-commerce sites

With more complex algorithms that factor in local, personal and universal search features, search rankings are not always consistent. Today’s results often depend on a user’s location, their search history and their behavior with the search results – sometimes you can see different search results for the same search terms, even on two different computers in the same location.

One question many businesses have when hunting for a search engine optimization (SEO) company is, “Will this company know us and our audience well enough to turn our web business into something profitable, worthy of our investment?” Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discern the answer before you are three months into an agreement.

Web Traffic vs. Engagement

Is the goal of SEO to get as much traffic as possible to a website? Many SEO companies will lead you to believe that more traffic is all there is to it. Granted, getting more traffic is a part of it, but more eyeballs on a web page do not necessarily mean achieving your business goals.

Look at your web analytics – specifically the keywords that brought in the majority of traffic – then evaluate the quality of this traffic over the past month or quarter. A high bounce rate and low average time on site for visits from a particular keyword can indicate one or all of these:

Let me suggest that the focus of SEO should be audience engagement, rather than traffic. According to Eric T. Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified, “Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a clearly defined set of goals.” That’s pretty clear: Without specific goals, driving more traffic to your website sounds like a good option.

But if a visitor hits your site and bounces, your depth of visitor interaction is null. To truly engage a visitor requires relevance and targeted communication. So what is best for your business? I offer a different approach: using SEO to build audience engagement.

“But,” you ask, “what does that have to do with SEO?” Everything, if you want long-term customer loyalty rather than more, sort-of-qualified traffic. Loyalty is a measurable metric and often comes with SEO rewards like fabulous testimonials and links from customer sites.

At the end of the day, businesses want SEO consultants who tailor their Internet marketing directly to the bottom line by bringing valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and returning customers – rather than simply getting more traffic to the site.

About the Author

Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, founded in 2000 to provide tailored Internet marketing plans – valuable traffic from multiple sources, optimized conversion rates and loyal customers.

Up to very recently, conversion rate optimization (CRO) was dominated by consultants who were providing the optimization solutions as a blend of empirical experience with a little bit of technology. The practitioners were relying more on the art of persuasive copy writing and the best design practices, and less on the technology and scientific methods. The advent of new multivariate testing technologies, adaptive multivariate testing in particular, is significantly impacting the industry’s best practices. Although they are still important and relevant, they are no longer dominant. Using traditional best practices is a great way to initialize the CRO journey but they are by no means the final destination.

New optimization technology is consistently revealing that what works for one company may not work for another. Even more subtle, two vendors selling the exactly the same type product, optimizing the very same type of web page elements, using the same marketing ideas, might get significantly different outcomes.

That is why three simple rules below are so important for opening doors for the use of technology and creating much higher value with the conversion rate optimization.

A: Maximize the performance of existing web pages before considering a new design

One of the biggest misconceptions in conversion rate optimization business is thinking that the only way that you can get higher page conversion rates is to completely re-design your web page or a complete website. This immediately sounds like a complicated and expensive endeavor that turns off the great majority e-merchants. They think: Not now. We have no time, money, or resources to do it.

The multivariate testing technology is revealing that your existing web pages have a lot of potential for improvement. By casting a wide net and experimenting with many small, almost invisible changes, you will almost certainly find a combination of these changes that produces a great increase in conversion rate.

Take a look at the example below (for the complete case study please visit e-Loser):

These two pages look almost exactly the same. Upon first look there is nothing that will make you think that any one of them should be 39% better.

Further analysis of the importance of each variation is making this picture even more startling:

The small numbers in the Relative Importance table are showing the difference in the conversion rate between a page that has one of the variations and the control (your existing web page). As you can see in this example, none of the new variation has had any significant impact individually.

But surprisingly, a combination of several small changes compounds to produce a very significant increase in the page conversion rate. Very few marketing professionals are aware of these multivariate testing methodology characteristics.

B: Be Different

During A-B or traditional multivariate tests you had to be prepared to experience a temporary dip in conversion rate during the optimization tests as a price of discovering a version of the page that will make money for you in the long run. This was happing because of the certainty that you will test more losers than winners and hence your conversion rate will temporarily suffer.

The fear of this testing risk was preventing many companies from even trying to optimize. And those who would dare would often elect to try to minimize the risk by testing more of the same. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different result. In reality, to get great results you have to try some new and radically different ideas.

To deal with the temporary loss concerns, many vendors will either downplay its occurrence or they would try to spin it in positive way, like it was done by a recent Ektron’s white paper: “Fail faster with multivariate testing“.

The adaptive multivariate testing technology is creating a breakthrough by its ability to eliminate this risk of testing. This technology is able to adapt to visitor’s behavior in real-time. The algorithm’s training period is very short (often no longer than couple of days). After that, only page combinations that have high probability to beat the base line are tested. As result, you will see an improvement in your conversion rate during the test itself.

C: Do not turn your optimization system off

A traditional approach to conversion rate optimization is a multi-step process: design the test, run the test, verify results, and then permanently implement the winning page.

With traditional optimization technologies you could not do it differently. These products are designed to act as testing tools and to passively measure the test outcomes.

To dramatize the difference between the adaptive multivariate testing approach and traditional testing methods we like to compare the traditional solution to a thermometer.

The adaptive method on the other side acts as an active component of the website that continually adopts itself to the most current visitor behavior. Hence, to stay in the same metaphor, we compare the adaptive approach to a thermostat. Like your home thermostat that is continually managing your energy consumption, your website thermostat will continually manage your online channel ROI.

Conclusion

The goal of this article was not to minimize an importance of the experienced online marketer who is necessary for achieving great increases in the website conversion rate. Instead, we wanted to suggest an effective way of using adaptive multivariate testing technology to expand the potential of a good marketing. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/9U_LXDiYHeQ/the-best-conversion-rate-optimization-practices-are-dead-well-not-so-soon Before the advent of multivariate testing technologies, the only option for conversion rate optimization practitioners was to follow empirically proven “best practices”. Now that multivariate tests are often showing that many of the best practices are not as generally applicable as originally thought, many are questioning their validity. We think that the best practices deserve the attention but be wary of their limitations. http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=434 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:21:42 -0800

If you never did any conversion rate optimization, you need to adopt a simple practical framework. The Internet is full of these “10 best” … “7 essential” … or other adjectives used to describe the most important things you need to do to optimize your pages. In the past, consultants would use these rules to design effective websites. With the advent of testing tools, these rules are then used to design A-B (sometimes called Split Tests) or multivariate tests (rarely, done only by very few large e-commerce players).

The most popular tool for A-B testing is Google’s Website Optimizer. To see what kind of results others are getting you should visit: WhichTestWon.com or Abtests.com.

Let us make our own contribution to the best practices framework:

	Your web pages are your most valuable online real-estate. Adding a new feature and content could make sense on the element-by-element basis. For example, additional text can help your organic SEO ranking, a breadcrumb navigation can enhance user experience, product recommendations can help visitors make easier buying decision, etc.

At some point, your web pages will start to look like a Christmas tree after the holidays, which can adversely impact your conversion rates.

The reality is that you must do everything possible so that your customers can find the products they want efficiently and help them make easy purchase decisions.

However, at some point your efforts will become counter productive.

Is there a sane way of approaching this subject

After presiding to hundreds conversion rate optimization tests we can tell you with certainty that all best practices are dead. There is no general rule that can predict visitor reaction to a particular page component and even less on changes of multiple page elements at the same time.

So, do not even bother with all the articles that start with “7 best …” or “ top 10.” Such advices can work some and can completely fail for others.

What you need is a scientific approach that can give you specific answers to your specific web page and the exact set of page elements. This scientific approach is called multivariate testing. For those who have never heard of this term, multivariate testing is defined as the experimentation with multiple page elements at the same time.

Multivariate Testing Is A Scientific Approach

The reason is very simple. Each web page has its own visual signature that forces human eye to read its content in a different way. This is because our brains are wired to notice the most visible element on the page first and not to scan a web page top to bottom or left to right.

By adding or removing an element of a web page you will change its visual signature. This will then change the order in which elements are read, which can have an unpredictable impact on how this new version of the page is processed by a web visitor.

In the online business, your enemy is the very short visitor attention span. A typical reaction time is less than second or two. So, if you do not ‘hook’ your visitor quickly, he is gone and you have lost a conversion (or sale).

Be aware of A-B test flaws

One might argue that a simple A-B testing, where you will test the impact of one element at a time, will do the job. This is highly unlikely. Applying the results of the individual tests and then extending that logic to combinations of elements will only work if each element is completely independent from one another. This is rarely the case.

For example, in your A-B test you might determine that a red Add-To-Cart button is better than a blue one, and that green font color for the product price is better than a maroon color. However, after running a multivariate test of all the possible page combinations, you might find that the combination with highest conversion rate is the one that has maroon font color for price and a blue Add-To-Cart button.

Why such unexpected behavior? We already mentioned a technical answer: each combination has its own visual signature and conversion rate. Practical reasoning might be described like this: your product has a very completive price – the maroon color of your price is more visible against the blue Add-To-Cart button – as a result, the visitor is quickly ‘hooked’ to your price and the decision to buy is made more frequently.

The Usual Suspects

Here is a short list of troubled elements that should help you formalize your thinking and arrange multivariate testing:

We are sure that others can identify many other types of content or widgets that are being added to a typical web site. Our objective was to initialize your thinking so that you can apply similar testing criteria on any other web page element that your website might have.

	One would think that the days of ‘dot-com’ businesses are the distant past. Lessons learned. Dues paid. We know better today. Well, take look at the online marketing business. How is it possible that more than 10 years since the demise of ‘eye balls’ as a measure of website performance do we find that we are still stuck in the “number of visitors” paradigm?

E-Commerce Metrics: Data Overload

The issue is not about availability of website analytics data. Actually, it is the opposite. This way, online marketers are hit by mountains of non-relevant and non-actionable data.

That is why for the majority of companies, the number of web visitors is still the main KPI (key performance indicator). We all understand what that number means and thanks to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and armies of SEO consultants, we all know how to increase it (with the help of hard dollars or soft marketing actions).

On the other side, the conversion rate numbers are quietly swept under the rug. They are treated as temperature readings that nobody can control.

Well, let us break the news. Website conversion rates can be controlled and a ‘website thermostat’ already exists. Can your company afford not to use it?

A Beginning Of A New Marketing Era

The Adobe’s $1.8 B acquisition of Omniture (one of the largest web analytics and web optimization companies) marks the beginning of mainstream adoption of smart website management technology (i.e. the use of a ‘website thermostat’).

The main theme of this acquisition is that ‘Marketing is the new finance.’ The historic shift from traditional to online medium and its associated ability to collect and act on marketing data in real time is impacting the corporate marketing function in similar ways as the advancement of computer has impacted the finance industry in the 60s.

So, how should this impact your thinking and behavior?

Here is a simplistic picture of the online battlefield. On one side you have a limited number of qualified visitors (potential buyers). On the other side you have ever-increasing number of e-commerce merchants and lead generation companies competing for web visitor attention.

Getting more web visitors is increasingly hard and expensive for many companies. Just check the latest PPC numbers for your keywords. Organic SEO and social marketing are great, but not every company can earn its place on the fist page of the Google’s search.

Smart companies have already discovered that a small investment in CRO (conversion rate optimization) is producing dramatically higher ROI than the alternative investment in traffic generation.

Simple Practical Steps

CRO is not as complicated as you might think. Here is a simple 3-step framework to get you up to speed:

Step #1: Get familiar with your conversion rates

Step #2: Understand different testing methods

Step #3: Play

We believe that marketing is rapidly becoming science rather than art. With the start of the new decade you have an opportunity to enhance your online marketing playbook with the conversion rate optimization capability. This is a virtually risk free method for increasing online sales.

There seems to be a lot of noise in the Digital Marketing world at the moment. Sometimes, it can be difficult to sort out which technologies and companies can really help you achieve your goals as an eCommerce site. Can more traffic really be the endgame? Will a new site really help more people find what they want from you? Why do so many SEOs keep calling you with an offer to be on Page One of Google for the keywords of your choice?
Don’t let that distract you from things that can really make a difference to you — and in the end, unless you’re a glorified billboard on the Internet, the real difference-maker is more money. While being #1 on the search engine listings is nice, and important, it’s not the difference-maker that CRO is.

Merchandise is Ready to Go - Are You Optimized for the Holidays?

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Everyone knows the words to the song. Pretty soon, any retail outlet you approach will be booming out holiday-cheer tunes ad nauseam. But, for the moment, let’s try to keep the urge to vomit down and think about what really matters for eCommerce — and that’s making your website the BEST POSSIBLE store window you can have. Store window, eh, you say? Yes, you’re probably right. That metaphor doesn’t really work too well any more. Frankly, people arrive at your online checkout page through a variety of sources, and the important thing for you is to INCREASE REVENUE.

Increase revenue = conversion goal. It’s that simple. So how can CRO help that number to rise? and can it really rise in time to make the holiday season more profitable for a site like yours?

I know what you’re thinking, it’s always risky to try something new when the number of visitors is highest and at the time of the year when revenues are most critical to the company “making the numbers.” Right?

So let me tell you why – or rather, three ways how CRO is going to make you more money during this holiday season.

Three Ways CRO Makes You More Money

• CRO takes variations of your page and, through the technology, rearranges them through how your visitors react to them. After a very small number of visitors, CRO converges on the best combination of those variations, making subsequent visitors MUCH MORE LIKELY to buy. That leads to an increased conversion rate while you test.
• The right CRO product is architected in a way to burn through very few visitors to begin converging, and requires no technical staff or technical intervention to work.
• You don’t need a new website, or more visitors — the technology lets these assets “sweat” more for you.

Three Things You Don’t Need in Order to Do CRO

• Glorified heat maps. Yes, it’s nice to analyze where potential customer eyes go, and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as testing everything. Get a tool that will let you.
• Someone else “best practices” imported into your eCommerce site. Why’s that? Because someone else’s best practice applied to you is the surest way to create yourself an average company. Invasive species are usually unwelcome in a new ecosystem.
• Expensive consultants. A good design person isn’t expensive, can plug the variations into the right tool, and then the test runs itself. You don’t need reports about statements of work, areas to target, etc.

Thermostats Help Regulate, Unlike Thermometers

Thermometers Provide Information - Useful Only in Context

Why the Right KPIs Don’t Just Tell, They Act

Having seen enough KPIs in enough organizations — as I am sure you have, too — I agree that it’s time to get serious about dealing with analytics. Avinash Kaushik’s recent post talks about KPIs to die for. Naturally, since Hiconversion is a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) SaaS vendor, I agree with him that Conversion Rate is #1.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the agreement ends. Typically, the discussion in the market tends to take on this sort of tone. And if you frame CRO in terms of Google Website Optimizer or Omniture, you’re bound to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why do I say that? Three reasons, really:

• Google Website Optimizer is an excellent thermometer. It can tell you the temperature, but can’t actually do anything about it without expensive consulting services, lots and lots of hard-earned website traffic, and extensive technical intervention – unless testing two AND ONLY two versions of your page (A/B testing) over a long period of time and hoping that one of these two pages is a “correct guess” suits your business. And Google Website Optimizer will never actually “act” for you.
• Omniture is a wonderful analytics suite that costs a fortune in terms of license and support. It’s an expensive thermometer with a limited ability to “act”, and unless you have a large traffic profile, technically inclined staff, and analytics experts, it’s generally not going to give you the results you need. It certainly cannot be a thermostat without significant integration to other systems.
• That excludes about 95-99% of eBusinesses who could really use CRO to get more revenue, within a few short weeks, using their same website and at their same traffic levels, with minimal technical intervention or “consulting services.”

I’m not trying to turn this blog posting into a sales pitch for Hiconversion — I’m more interested in analyzing the tone of the discussion in the market, and what it really means to most eBusinesses. More importantly, I think that if we agree that Conversion Rate is the most important KPI an eBusiness can use to regulate its business, then using a thermostat and NOT a thermometer is crucial. Acting in June on temperature readings from March demonstrates the point — act on the data as you receive them, not months later.

An affordable, easy-to-set thermostat is naturally preferable, right? And a conversion rate tool that drives visitors towards the optimal “winning page combination” is very important if you don’t have the technical or analytics expertise in-house and want to keep costs down.

There aren’t many affordable Conversion Rate thermostats out there, but free thermometers can’t do what efficient, effective, and current thermostats can. Be choosy and select the one that fits your business-critical KPIs. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ConversionRateOptimization/~3/g-sQV0LMHMw/increasing-conversion-is-not-reducing-bounces With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog [...] http://hiconversion.net/conversion-rate-optimization-blog/?p=280 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:48:55 -0700 With Google Website Optimizer releasing new features and announcing them at eMetrics in Washington, DC, there seems to be a growing cadre of Conversion Optimization specialists prepared to use this tool to drive website Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Is that really a good idea? Let’s investigate how this translates into practice, using a recent blog post as an example.