We are extremely proud to release a brand new feature in Visual Website Optimizer: Revenue Tracking. This is a significant new development for our product because it means now in addition to tracking conversion rate (for multiple goals such as clicks on links, visit to pages, form submissions, engagement, etc.), you can track various revenue metrics as well (including revenue per visitor, total revenue, average order value, etc.)
Revenue tracking for A/B split tests is utmost important when a monetary transaction is involved (either immediately or at the end of conversion funnel) and a conversion goal may have different monetary values. In some cases, higher conversion rate may translate into lower revenue, so basing all decisions merely on conversion rate can lead you to choosing a variation that actually decreases your revenue.
Let’s imagine that a software / eCommerce company is running a split test on pricing page where (in a variation) lowest plan of $2o has been removed. For example, imagine running a test such as below:
If you just measure conversion rate, you can expect to see following results (lower conversion rate for variation since we removed smallest plan in it):
However, if you start measuring revenue for this split test, you can see that variation actually resulted in higher revenue per visitor:
Naturally, you would want to choose a variation which results in higher per visitor revenue even if total number of conversions and conversion rate decreases. That’s why revenue tracking is so important for A/B, split and multivariate tests. It lets you measure impact of your test variations on a metric that drives your business: revenue.
We believe revenue tracking shouldn’t be hard and that’s why we have tried to make it dead-simple to implement it in Visual Website Optimizer. All you need to do is this:
For example, if the page where we redirect after successful plan purchase is http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/thank-you.php then all we need to do is to copy-paste default VWO code there and also output following code:
<script>
_vis_opt_revenue=49;
</script>
Of course, the value of revenue (49 in this case) will change dynamically depending on actual revenue generated by the visitor. If you already have revenue tracking setup with your web analytics tool (such as Google Analytics), extending it for Visual Website Optimizer should be a piece of cake. If not, just ask your IT guy, he would know where and how to output revenue for tracking. All in all, implementing revenue tracking in Visual Website Optimizer is quite simple.
Once revenue tracking is in place, you will see extensive reports like following:
As you can see, reports show you various metrics for different variations:
Hope you like this new feature! Let us know if you need any help or assistance with revenue tracking in Visual Website Optimizer.
Sometimes it takes a radical redesign to get big results. ClickLab is a Brazilian agency specialized in Conversion Rate Optimization and they used Visual Website Optimizer to test a radical redesign of the primary page on WriteWork.com, a popular essay website for students.
They chose to focus on the page which receives most entrance traffic. The traffic is nearly exclusively organic and the page has been struggling with high bounce rates for a while. The objective was to increase engagement and get more people further down the funnel.
After crunching user surveys, getting feedback from tools such as UserTesting.com, Fivesecondtest.com, Gazehawk.com and ConceptFeedback.com a radical redesign was developed and recently tested using Visual Website Optimizer.
One challenge was how to go about testing the new design. Pretty much everything was different, from header to footer. This means a user might land on the homepage, which has one look, then click on to the redesigned page, which has a different look.
Luckily this is easily solved in Visual Website Optimizer. Since the primary objective was to increase engagement on the landing page, the following segmentation trick was used:
By restricting the test to only the visitors landing on the page, engagement could be measured without having to worry about the design not being consistent throughout the site.
The original page didn’t communicate what the benefits of the service are. Following is how original design looked like:
After reviewing over 1,000 survey responses it became clear what the real benefits were and then these benefits were communicated much more directly in the variation. Secondly, social proof and various credibility indicators were introduced. Here is how variation looked like:
The result of the test was that engagement more than doubled. One important thing to note is that engagement in Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) only measures clicks and not submissions of forms, for example using a search form (for this reason searches were measured separately).
The great thing about VWO is that you can measure multiple goals. This meant it’s possible to see exactly where the engagement was happening – the biggest increase was indeed clicks on the CTA. The four top buttons accounted for less 1% in the engagement increase.
The secondary objective was to get people to click on the primary CTA and here results increased by 144%.
This meant that more than twice as many people continued on to the payment page. More payment page views doesn’t automatically more payment, but a follow up test showed that payments went up by over 50%.
Actually, although the results were fantastic, they weren’t that surprised. After going over the surveys from users it became so clear that the original really did a terrible job at selling the service.
What allowed them these fantastic results was that they started with the user in mind; doing everything they could to understand him/her. Understand their wants, their worries and their needs. They also looked very closely at the language used on the website. For example, WriteWork has always used the expression “overcome writer’s block”, but no users used these words. Instead users wanted to hear “get started” and “get inspiration”. So now they use that language on the website.
Jens Schriver from ClickLab gave Visual Website Optimizer a nice, short testimonial:
It was a breeze to setup this A/B test and segment it. We’ve used Google Website Optimizer many times in the past, but – if we can avoid it – we are not going back
Hope you liked this case study. Our online case study library has many more A/B split testing case studies. And if you’d like to do a similar A/B test on your website, we have a free 30 day (no obligation) trial of Visual Website Optimizer.
This is the 2nd article in the series of interviews and guest posts we are doing on this blog regarding A/B testing and conversion rate optimization. In 1st article, we interviewed Oli from Unbounce on Landing Pages Best Practices.
Editor’s note: this guest post is written by Noah Kagan, founder of web app deals website Appsumo. I have known Noah for quite some time and he is the goto person for any kind of marketing or product management challenges. You can follow him on Twitter @noahkagan. In the article below Noah shares some of the A/B testing secrets and realities that he discovered after doing hundreds of tests on Appsumo.
AppSumo.com reaches around 5,000 visitors a day. A/B testing has given us some dramatic gains such as increasing our email conversion over 5x and doubling our purchase conversion rate.
However, I wanted to share some harsh reality about our testing experiences. I hope sharing this helps encourage you not to give up with testing and get the most out of it. Here’s a data point that will most likely surprise you:
Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests have driven significant change.
That’s preposterous. Not just a great vocab word but a harsh reality. Here are a few tests from us that I was SURE would produce amazing results only to disappoint us later.
Hypothesis: Title testing. We get a lot of traffic to our landing page and having a more clear message will significantly increase conversions.
Result: Not-conclusive. We’ve tried over 8 versions and so far not one has produced any significant improvement.
Why it failed: People don’t read. (Note: the real answer here is “i dont know why it didn’t work out, thats why im doing AB testing”)
Suggestion: We need more drastic changes to our page like showing more info about our deals or pictures to encourage a better conversion rate.
Hypothesis: Having a tweet for a discount pop-up in a light-box vs someone having to click a button to tweet. Assumed reducing a click and putting it (annoyingly) in front of someones face will encourage more tweets.
Result: 10% decrease with light-box version.
Why it failed: ANNOYING. Totally agree. Also, it was premature as people had no idea about it nor were interested in tweeting at that moment.
Suggestion: Better integrate peoples desire to share into our site design.
Hypothesis: A discount would encourage more people to give us their email on our landing page.
Result: Fail. Decreased conversion to email on our landing page.
Why it failed: An email is a precious resource and we are dealing with sophisticated users. Unless you are familiar with our brand which is a small audience then you aren’t super excited to trade your email for % off.
Suggestion: Give away $ instead of % off. Also, offer the % off with examples of deals so they can see what they could use it for.
All of these were a huge surprise and a disappointment for me.
How many times have you said, “this experience is 100x better, I can’t wait to see how much it beats the original version?”
A few days later you check your testing dashboard to see it actually LOSING.
Word of caution. Be aware of premature e-finalization. Don’t end tests before data is finalized (aka statistically significant).
I learned the majority of my testing philosophy at SpeedDate where literally every changed is tested and measured. SO MANY times my tests initially blew the original version away only to find out a few days later that a) the improvement wasn’t as amazing after all or b) it actually lost.
Some A/B testing tips based on my experience:
Most people test 80 different things instead of 1 priority over and over. It simplifies your life.
If you like this article follow @appsumo for more details and check out Appsumo.com for fun deals.
Editor’s note: Hope you liked the guest post. It is true that many A/B tests produce insignificant results and that’s precisely the reason that you should be doing A/B testing all the time. For next articles in this series, if you know someone whom I can interview or want to contribute a guest post yourself, please get in touch with me (paras@wingify.com).
We had an awesome webinar on landing page optimization yesterday where the team from Conversion Voodoo and GazeHawk analyzed 3 landing pages (chosen at random from a pool of 200+ submitted landing pages). Then I gave a quick demo of creating an A/B test on one of the chosen landing pages using Visual Website Optimizer.
Take a cup of coffee and bask in 30 minutes of pure conversion-rate-optimization awesomeness!
Hope you like the recorded webinar. Feel free to ask any questions on any of the points raised in webinar (simply leave a comment below).
We (at Visual Website Optimizer) are starting a series on the blog where the experts in A/B testing, landing pages, conversion rate optimization will share everything they know about how to increase sales and conversions online. If you know someone whom I can interview or want to contribute a guest post yourself, please shoot me an email at paras@wingify.com.
The first interview in this series is by Oli Gardner (@unbounce on Twitter), who is a Co-founder of Unbounce.com – the DIY Landing Page Platform. He created the Unbounce conversion blog to discuss a variety of marketing subjects such as landing pages, conversion centered design, social media conversion and ethical lead capture for business.
Editor’s Note: this interview is all about landing page best practices. Previously on this blog, I had analyzed 50+ landing pages and came up with some practical landing page optimization tips. After reading the interview, you may want to check out the post too.
How important are landing pages for paid marketing? Why can’t a company simply redirect traffic to its homepage? What is the actual purpose of landing pages?
Landing pages are critical for any promotion specific marketing – but in particular for paid marketing where a measured ROI is essential to your success (and your ability to gain budgetary approval). The reason why you want to direct your paid traffic to a landing page vs. your homepage is that your homepage is often designed to be a generic entry point to your brand and business. It may contain references to many products or services – rendering the ability for a potential customer to find your intended conversion path amidst 40-70 links unlikely at best – impossible at worst. Which leads nicely into the third part of your question. The purpose of a landing page is to provide a hyper-focused experience that is designed to accomplish the singular conversion goal of your marketing campaign.
Usually landing pages look separate from main website (due to different design, userflow). Do you recommend this distinction between landing pages and main website?
I wouldn’t recommend making a stylistic or brand change to the design of your landing page. It’s important to keep it consistent with what your main website represents and what people have experienced in the past (brand memory).
The most elemental conversion principal is what’s known as message match. This is a two-way concept that applies to the information scent passing from ad to landing page (your Google AdWords ad talks about green apples, and so does your landing page), but it also applies to the next step in the conversion funnel, which is the visual brand connection from landing page to website. I’ll explain both of these a bit more.
If you are doing an ecommerce based “click through” landing page – designed to warm up the prospect’s interest in your offer before passing them on to your website/cart/registration page then you need to maintain “design match” where the visual and tonal brand guidelines are perpetuated on the destination site. If you don’t do this you risk a trust interruption which can cause people to bail.
For a lead gen landing page (often called a squeeze page – although I don’t really like the term or the negative segment of the industry typically associated with it) – the experience often ends on the landing page – which means the follow up experience isn’t quite as critical – but in the case of a big company – there will be a certain amount of brand memory where people expect a connection to their preconceived idea of how you present yourself. Again, without this design/brand match you can lose people.
What are the most important characteristics of highly converting landing pages?
Focus. Simple and obvious writing. Clean design with an eye for contrast, whitespace and clarity. A clear call to action that describes what will happen when it’s clicked. Stick to those and you’re half way there.
If I had to distill it down to two points, I’d say a headline that you can read in 5 seconds and know what the page and offer is about and a brutally obvious cal to action (CTA). For some inspiration when designing your page to convert – read Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages.
If you are asked to fix only one thing in a badly performing landing page, what would it be?
That’s easy. The thing that was causing it to perform badly! Sadly, it’s not really that simple.
The thing to fix will most often be “message match” – this is the part that most people get wrong. You sell someone on a promise with your ad, then when they get to the page, the first thing they read/see represents a different story. So in a generic sense I’d say fix your message match and you’ll fix 80% of your problems.
But this is a bit of a trick question. What you need to do is spend some time walking in your customer’s shoes to understand what they are experiencing when they arrive at your page. Perhaps by trying a 5-second test.
Long vs. short controversy! How do you prevent making a landing page too sparse that users don’t get motivated or too long so users get distracted?
Long vs. short is a classic debate and one that can only be proven through A/B testing so I won’t harp on about any specific hypothesis here. Some higher priced items require more detail – but they also require more research – in which case a landing page may not suffice anyway. It depends on the page goal. If it’s lead gen – then you *must* provide enough incentive to complete the form – whether that’s a big long story or a sufficiently appropriate prize in exchange for the personal data.
What are your favorite landing pages on the web? (What about worst landing pages on the web?)
My favorite page (other than my own of course) tend to come from Webtrends. They just seem to nail it every time. #1 on this compilation and another great example here. Aside from them, Full Sail University does a consistently great job, particularly for lead gen.
Whatever is offered on a landing page (demo, trial, whitepaper, etc.), do you recommend putting it behind a small lead-gen form or should you give a direct link?
Yes and no. I personally think it’s something you need to mix up from time to time.
Make it Free. Sometimes it’s great to give away your expertise (particularly an ebook) without any barrier to entry. The goodwill marketing momentum you receive can be worth a lot more than a few leads. If you do this, just make sure you brand your ebook very well (every page should contain your logo and website URL) and a footer that states that you happily encourage the free sharing of your content. Many people don’t know if they should be sharing it without feeling guilty, and a lot of people suffer from guilt issues – so don’t let this prevent you from benefiting from your generosity. Also, there are a lot of old-school marketers out there who are STILL afraid to give content away (thtoopid, thtoopid) – thinking it should be copyrighted and protected and locked in a vault.
Ask for Data. If you are doing classic lead gen, then you are going to be giving something to your visitors in exchange for their personal information. The key here is to balance the size of the barrier (how much personal data you are asking for) with the size of the prize (what you are offering in return). A/B testing the length of your forms may point to an ideal form size to suit your needs. There are two kinds of barrier with forms – privacy and effort. Awkward or overly personal questions can put people off, or make them enter fake data (which helps no one), while super long forms just serve to make people sigh and hit the back button. If you must ask for a lot of information, make it worthwhile with a really valuable giveaway.
Editor’s note: That’s it for the interview! If you know someone whom I can interview or want to contribute a guest post yourself, please shoot me an email at paras@wingify.com. Also, as mentioned at the top of post, previously I had analyzed 50+ landing pages and came up with some practical landing page optimization tips. So, you may want to check out that post.
Note: this webinar has already happened. Here’s a recording.
Here’s your golden chance to get $1495 worth of analysis on your landing page which isn’t converting as well as it should. Visual Website Optimizer has teamed up with Conversion Voodoo and GazeHawk to present you a free landing page analysis workshop.
What? a live webinar where three (randomly chosen) landing pages will be analyzed by professionals
When? 9 AM PST (12 PM EST | 5 PM GMT). Thursday, 10th February 2011.
How to Register? click here to register for free
You are requested to register and submit a landing page / web page URL which you want to be analyzed. From submitted entries, we will pick 3 landing pages and the team at Conversion Voodoo will do an extensive analysis (worth $1000) to tell you what exactly can be fixed on that landing page for higher conversions and sales. See an example analysis by Conversion Voodoo below just to get an idea of what sort of analysis you could get for your own landing page:
GazeHawk has pitched in to provide heatmaps (worth $495) for all 3 landing pages which, based on actual eye tracking on your landing page, will show you what your visitors see on it and what they ignore. Here is how an example heatmap looks like:
All in all, you will see your own landing page analyzed and dissected by professionals in an entirely new way.
The 30 minute webinar on landing pages comprises of:
a) 15 minute session where Conversion Voodo will analyze 3 randomly chosen landing pages for free and GazeHawk will provide free heatmaps for those landing pages;
b) 15 minute session on how to use Visual Website Optimizer for creating A/B tests on one of the chosen landing pages.
Seats are limited so don’t miss the webinar! Attend the webinar to know if your landing page has been selected for analysis. Even if your landing page is not chosen, the webinar promises you to provide tons of insights on how to improve sales and conversions which you can apply immediately.
NOTE: A recording of the webinar will be sent after the event.
We already have A/B testing plugin for Wordpress and Drupal. Today we are proud to release a similar plugin for Joomla.
What’s the best thing about this plugin? Well, once you install this plugin on your Joomla site you can create unlimited number of A/B and multivariate tests (using Visual Website Optimizer) without requiring to modify a single line of code on your website. Watch a small video if you don’t believe that!
Installation Instructions
This plugin is made by Analytics for Joomla who make awesome plugins for Joomla.
For further details, visit Analytics For Joomla website to Download the plugin & read installation instructions. Or you can leave a comment if you need help.
The experience in the checkout flow is extremely important but quite fragile. Whenever visitors have taken the motivated action to “checkout” or “buy” they have already told you that they are ready, they are no longer using the shopping cart as a calculator to see how expensive it’s going to be. They WANT to buy your items now but why some of them end up abandoning the carts and not make a purchase? The simple answer is insecurity.
Here is how Optimeria (an agency specializing in conversion rate optimization) addressed the insecurity issues on Slideshop.com and drove a staggering +15% boost of conversions with only 3 changes on a single page.
Results were +15.05% conversion rate increase with a 98% statistical validity and 200+ conversions per treatment.
The test was a radical split test where they bundled multiple elements into one single treatment and put it to test against the control (original checkout page). Prior to constructing the variation page, they made use of an extensive range of conversion flow analysis and also used findings in other tests from the same client (see other case study: how left navigation menu increased conversions by 34% for an eCommerce website).
Original checkout page
Variation: 15% increase in sales
The checkout on Slideshop itself is a simplistic version of a normal checkout process because they sell a digitally downloadable product (Powerpoint presentations + elements). There are 3 simple steps in the overall process:
They identified 3 main problems with the current “enter email” page (step 1 in checkout) and decided to address them hoping to decrease shopping cart abandonment.
As you surf over the Internet as a shopper, a lot of decisions are made from intuition. Your brain only asks you from time to time to justify a choice your subconscious had already made for you. So in many ways you are actually shopping on autopilot.
This autopilot does not like when things aren’t as expected. This specially true in checkout step because it is so close to making an actual payment. Therefore they needed to address the concern (on Slideshop checkout page) of asking for an email address without any explicit motivation. They also needed to tell WHY and WHAT the benefits of this transaction are (I give you my email address and you give me what?)
They addressed this particular issue by adding a value to the transaction (Send download to this email address) and stressed that email information would not be misused, sold or shared. They fulfilled the value to the customer in this exchange: I give you my email address and you give me a link for my download.
No service is alike. There are always unique concerns that only apply to one business, product or service and in this case they already knew that one of the concerns of the customer was “How can I actually use your product once I’ve downloaded it“. They address this issue several key places in the website already, however they felt that adding it on checkout page at (a crucial moment in the decision making process) would help build up necessary motivation to follow through on the purchase.
Additionally, their thesis was that addressing the concern about what to do if a download is incomplete or gets deleted and making it clear that once purchased, the customer can always re-downloaded it would add to the motivation for completing the transaction.
They addressed both issues at a very center and prominent position just beneath the call to action to signal to the user that they know these concerns were there and that customers shouldn’t be worried about them.
When a call to action is as crucial as “continue to payment options” it’s also going to set in motion some common insecurities about the next transaction. Even though we all know that we aren’t going to be charged anything before filling in credit card details, we still don’t like the feeling of being in a situation where issues like “What kind of credit cards do you accept?” and “Is the transaction secure?” aren’t adressed before moving on to actual payment step.
You might think that it doesn’t matter as much because first step is not the actual payment page, however your users’ brains don’t make that distinction. They are already fast-forwarding to the payment situation where another decision is going to be made. At this point, they can subconsciously act on insecurities to avoid being put in a situation where it “feels wrong” and hence simply abandon the shopping cart.
They addressed this by adding following in the variation:
All this to make the user at-ease with the current stage of the decision process.
Well, even though some of these elements are unique for Slideshop and the market in which they operate, the learning from this case study is that it is crucial to address key concerns (conscious and subconscious ones) at the right stage in the decision process.
Karsten Lund is CEO of Optimeria, a Danish company which is a Visual Website Optimizer certified partner. He recently wrote about a case study (in Danish) where he managed to increase sales by 15% by optimizing checkout page. He used Visual Website Optimizer for A/B testing so on our request, he translated the case study in English and we published it above.
