Website Optimisation Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion

This is the 5th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results “hybrid” approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Optimising Your Site Content To Convert More Visitors

Most attempts to increase the effectiveness of websites that I have seen revolve mainly around increasing traffic volume. While increasing traffic volume is undoubtedly an important factor, it ignores the other side of the coin - the percentage of website visitors who convert into qualified enquirers and customers.

In the short term, there is normally more leverage in improving your site’s conversion rate than in Search Engine Optimisation.

One technique for improving conversion rate is to serve different content to different visitors, then trace conversions back to the content served. Multivariate testing platforms can be used to handle the technical side of this process, provided that you know what page components to test and how to test them. The following case study illustrates what some of these factors are.

Case Study:

Australia’s leading speed dating service Blink Dating asked us for assistance to increase their already impressive conversion rate. We set up a multivariate testing schema that included the following elements:

• 4 headlines
• 4 photos
• 3 versions of the main call to action
• 2 registration form headlines
• 2 registration form designs
• 2 privacy policies

In total, this makes 4 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 384 page combinations organized into an experimental design that allows relatively fast and accurate testing of the different versions using Taguchi multivariate analysis.

Above: 384 landing page combinations were tested, increasing the conversion rate of Blink Dating’s online client acquisition process by 20% within 6 weeks.

This process resulted in a conversion and sales improvement of 20% within 6 weeks by identifying which page elements were most effective at encouraging visitors to sign up.

Recommended Tool: Google’s recently released (and free!) Website Optimizer is a huge advance on many previous multivariate testing platforms. You can think of this tool as “Free Money”.

Conclusion

For some reason, most business owners and marketing managers I talk to get very excited about search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, but are far less enthusiastic about website conversion optimisation efforts. Why? Increasing website can be equally as effective and often faster than SEO efforts. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Will Swayne Website Conversion Geek

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