Visual Website Optimizer

In a previous post, I provided a downloadable A/B testing significance calculator (in excel). In this post, I will provide a calculator which lets you estimate how many days should you run a test in order to obtain statistically significant results. But, first, a disclaimer.

There is no guarantee of results for an A/B test

When someone asks how long should s/he run an A/B test, the ideal answer would be until eternity or till the time you get results (whichever is sooner). In an A/B test, you can never say with full confidence that you will get statistically significant results after running the test X number of days. Instead, what you can say is that there is 80% (or 95%, whatever you choose) probability of getting statistically significant result (if it indeed exists) after X number of days. But, of course, it may be the case that there is in fact no difference in performance of control and variation so no matter how long you wait, you will never get a statistically significant result.

So, how long should you run your A/B test?

Download and use the calculator below to find out how many visitors you need to include in the test. There are 4 pieces of information that you need to enter:

• Conversion Rate of original page
• What % difference in conversion rate do you want to detect (if you want to detect even the slightest improvement, it will take much longer)
• Number of variations to test (more variations you test, more traffic you need)
• Average daily traffic on your site (not really needed, optional)

Once you enter these 4 parameters, the calculator below will find out how many visitors you need to test (for 80% and 95% probability of finding the result). You can stop the test after you test those many visitors, but you should never stop earlier than that. You may end up concluding wrong results.

A/B test duration calculator (Excel spreadsheet)

Click below to download the calculator:

Download A/B testing duration calculator.

Please feel free to share the file with your friends and colleagues or post it on your blog / twitter.

PS: By the way, if you want to do quick calculations, we have a version of this calculator hosted on Google Docs (please make a copy of the Google Doc sheet into your own account before you make any changes to it).

How does the calculator work?

Ah! The million dollar calculator. Explaining how it works is beyond the scope of this post as it is too technical (maybe a separate post). But, if you have got stomach for it, below is gist of how we calculate number of visitors needed to get significant results.

The graph above is taken from an excellent book called Statistical Rules of Thumb. Luckily, the chapter on estimating sample size is available to download freely [PDF]. Another excellent source to get more information on sample size estimation for A/B testing is Microsoft’s paper: Controlled Experiments on the Web: Survey and Practical Guide [PDF].

Hope you like the calculator and related resources. Excited to know your feedback and comments!

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Hyundai, the Korean giant, not just makes well-engineered cars, they have well-engineered online strategy as well. In the Dutch market, they hired one our certified partners, Traffic4U to optimize conversion rate on their lead-generation pages. Traffic4u is an experienced, international online marketing agency, specializing in Result Driven Online Marketing and since they are our partners, they chose Visual Website optimizer for testing and optimization on Hyundai.nl

In this case study, we catch up with Janco Klijnstra from Traffic4U who talks about how they used Visual Website Optimizer for increasing conversion rate by 62% for Hyundai.

Case Study: using multivariate testing to increase conversions

Hyundai has landing pages for all of their car models where people can request for a test drive or download a brochure. These landing pages mainly get traffic from paid advertising campaigns (but get some direct and SEO traffic too). They wanted to make most from this traffic hence partnered with Traffic4U for conducting a multivariate test on all car model pages.

There were several goals for this test that they wanted to optimize:

• Primary goal was a brochure request and/or request for a test drive
• Secondary Goal was a clickthrough from the car page to the first step of the funnel
• As a check engagement (inverse of bounce rate) was also measured

Why Multivariate Testing?

The main difference between A/B testing and multivariate testing is that in A/B testing variety of changes are done in a single variation while in multivariate testing, every change you make creates a new variation to be tested. So, multivariate testing is useful if you have multiple ideas to test on a page as it tells you exactly which changes impact your conversion rates and which don’t.

Hyundai’s car landing pages have a lot of different elements (car headline, car visuals, description, testimonials, etc.) so it was essential to setup a multivariate test in order to understand which elements influence a visitor’s decision to ask for a test drive or download a brochure.

What was tested?

Traffic4U setup a multivariate test and decided to create variations of following sections of the page:

• New (SEO friendly) text versus control text: hypothesis was that if they change their normal text to SEO friendly text and it doesn’t impact conversion rate, they can permanently implement it for SEO benefits
• Extra Call to action buttons versus no extra buttons: hypothesis was that extra call to action highlighted desired action
• Large photo of the car versus thumbnails: hypothesis was that larger photo entices the visitor and also confirms the visitors initial goal that he/she is on the right page

A total of 8 combinations (3 sections, 2 variations each = 2*2*2) were generated for this multivariate test. Here’s screenshot of the original page:

- Original page -

Results – which variation worked best?

The results of this multivariate test were phenomenal. One of those variations increased conversion rate (request for test drive or brochure) by 62%. And there was a staggering 208% increase in clickthrough rate (step 1 to step 2). Out of the total 8 combinations, can you guess which one increased conversions?

Well, the combination with SEO text, extra buttons and larger images did the wonder. It’s amazing how Traffic4U was spot on for all three changes. Here’s how the variation looked like:

- Winning variation (62% increase in leads) -

The results of this multivariate test are so phenomenal that it won a silver award in annual WhichTestWon awards!

Lessons learnt and value of Visual Website Optimizer

Traffic4U used lot of heuristics and best practices experience for coming up with variations for this test (larger pictures, clear call to action buttons, etc.). This test demonstrates that doing a proper multivariate test can validate those best practices. It may have been certainly possible that adding SEO text decreased conversions at the expense of extra traffic, however setting up a multivariate or A/B test can settle that dilemma easily.

When we asked Traffic4U about their comments on Visual Website Optimizer, here’s what they had to say:

Visual Website Optimizer was very valuable it made it possible for us as an agency to build our own variations, test on a group of pages and measures different goals at once. Also the Analytics plug-in was very helpful in the analysis for segmentation purposes.

This case study is an excellent example of how a large company (such as Hyundai) works with a specialized conversion rate optimization agency like Traffic4U to use multivariate testing for increasing business metrics such as test drive requests and brochure requests. If it worked for Hyundai, it can work for you too!

Signup for a free 30 day trial account of Visual Website Optimizer to easily setup multivariate tests on your website to increase sales and conversions.

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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.)

Why you should track revenue in your split tests?

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):

• Control (original page): 1.2%
• Variation (smallest plan removed): 0.8%

However, if you start measuring revenue for this split test, you can see that variation actually resulted in higher revenue per visitor:

• Control (original page): 28 cents per visitor revenue and $1400 total revenue
• Variation (smallest plan removed): 36 cents per visitor revenue and $1800 total revenue

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.

How to do Revenue Tracking in Visual Website Optimizer

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:

• Create A/B, split or multivariate test
• On goals page, select ‘Revenue Tracking’ as goal and enter the URL of the goal as the page where you will have access to visitor’s revenue number (it is typically available on thank you page after a successful payment / transaction)
• On that thank you page, you simply need to copy-paste default VWO code and output a JavaScript variable _vis_opt_revenue with value equal to total revenue generated by the visitor. For example, if the visitor purchased 2 items (one $15 and the other $7), simply output $22 in the variable. If visitor only bought one item (say $10), output $10 only. That’s it. You don’t have to be concerned about which variation visitor saw or what individual items did the visitor bought. You just need to output total revenue and Visual Website Optimizer will take care of the rest.

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>
    var _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.

How do Revenue Tracking reports look like?

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:

• Revenue per visitor (the basic metric that determines performance of variation)
• Total revenue
• Total number of conversions (you can calculate average order value as Total Revenue / Total conversions)

Hope you like this new feature! Let us know if you need any help or assistance with revenue tracking in Visual Website Optimizer.

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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.

Importance of Landing Pages

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.

Landing Page Best Practices

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.

Opinion on Landing Pages

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.

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We already have A/B testing plugin for WordPress and Drupal. Today we are proud to release a similar plugin for Joomla.

Split testing for Joomla without a single line of code

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.

• Download the Joomla plugin for VWO
• Upload plugin through Joomla administrator interface
• Select the plugin in the extensions – plugin section
• Enable plugin
• Add your VWO account id (visible in Manage Account section in VWO)
• That’s it! You are ready to create and run A/B tests on your website

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We recently rolled out new updates on Visual Website Optimizer which has made A/B testing easier than ever. In fact, we have made it so easy that you will be able to create A/B tests with your eyes closed. Don’t believe us? Watch the video below:

OK, so the claim of being able to create A/B tests with eyes closed was bit of an exaggeration but you can see just how incredibly easy we have made the whole processes of designing and creating A/B tests. Amongst numerous updates we rolled out, following are salient ones:

• Resizing images, buttons, text blocks, etc.
• Moving (or re-locating) text, button, headline, forms or just about anything on the webpage
• Hiding or removing sections on webpage
• Clubbing multiple changes on a page as one variation

These updates now allow you to change your original landing page or webpage in a variety of ways (moving, resizing, editing, hiding, etc.) to create totally different variations. Isn’t that cool?

Additionally, we introduced some new kinds of tests that you can see below:

As you can see above, now you can create 5 different kinds of tests in Visual Website Optimizer:

• A/B Test: club various changes on the page in one variation
• Multivariate Testing: every change is combined with every other change on the page and VWO automatically creates page variations from the combinations
• Split URL Testing: you host variation pages on your servers, VWO splits traffic amongst them
• Heatmap / Clickmap: visually see where visitors are clicking on your landing page or web page
• Measure Conversion Rate: measure conversion rate on multiple goals your website or landing page

Phew! Aren’t they lot of updates? If you are VWO user, we would love to get feedback on these new features. If you are not, we encourage you to Signup for Free Trial Account (no credit card needed) and start doing A/B testing on your website in less than 5 minutes.

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Many people seem to get confused about the terms A/B testing, split testing and multivariate testing. Essentially, A/B testing and split testing are the same concepts but multivariate testing is different. So for all practical concepts, consider A/B Testing = Split Testing. The following table will illustrate difference between A/B testing (or split testing) and Multivariate Testing:

	A/B Testing	Multivariate Testing
What is it?	In A/B testing you split traffic amongst two or more completely different versions of a webpage (landing page, home page, etc.) The variations of your original page can differ in any manner. You can either just change the headline; or you can even change entire design, layout, offer and what not in the variations. What you change in A/B test is only limited by your creativity. For example, if you are A/B testing on your landing page you may want to create one version with 15% discount, the other with free shipping and one with the same offer but different page design.	In multivariate test, you identify a few key areas/sections of a page and then create variations for those sections specifically (as opposed to creating variations of whole page in an A/B split test). So for example, in multivariate test you can choose to create different variations for 2 different sections: headline and image. A multivariate testing software will combine all these section specific variations to generate unique versions of page to be tested and then simply split traffic amongst those versions. That is, you will get these variations of the page: Headline1_Image1, Headline1_Image2, Headline2_Image1, Headline2_Image2.
How it works?
Traffic Required	Relatively Less	Huge
Best used for	Testing radically different ideas for conversion rate optimization	Optimizing and refining an existing landing page or homepage without doing significant investment in redesign
Example Case Study	Signups increased by 60% after actually removing the signup form	PDFProducer Multivariate Test Case Study

I hope that was a good comparison between A/B testing and multivariate testing. If you think I left any point, please let me know. I will update the comparison table accordingly.

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Last year, at the dawn of 2010 I wrote four reasons why 2010 is going to be a year of A/B split testing. Now that 2010 is coming to a close, I thought it will be great to revisit what happened in our tiny little (yet growing) industry of split testing and conversion rate optimization. Undoubtedly, the year saw explosive growth in the industry (and also for our A/B testing tool – Visual Website Optimizer). It was incredibly hard to pick 10 best A/B testing resources (not because there weren’t any, but rather there were simply too many great tools, websites, forums, tutorials, etc.). Anyhow, I managed to compile following is the list of top 10 resources (in no particular order):

WhichTestWon.com

WhichTestWon.com is an interesting website which features a new A/B split test every week. You can vote and discuss about which variation won in the test. It is a fun way to keep learning what usually works for increasing conversion rate on website.

ABTests.com

ABTests.com is an open forum where anyone can share and discuss their A/B test results. ABTests.com and WhichTestWon.com are two great websites when it comes to reading real-life A/B testing case studies. You simply can’t get enough of them!

Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing

The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing is a guest post I wrote for Smashing Magazine. I had tried to make this post as the definite resource for anyone who wants to get started with A/B testing. Judging from #2 position on Google for ‘A/B testing’ (#1 is Wikipedia), I think I have achieved my goal with that guest post.

#crochat (hashtag for Twitter)

#crochat is a hashtag used by a group of conversion rate optimization enthusiasts to chat on this topic every Thursday. I have seen everyone from experts to vendors to beginners participating in the chat and discussing interesting topics related to A/B testing.

MarketingExperiments.com

MarketingExperiments.com is an organization that does numerous split and multivariate tests every week and have been doing so for years now. They have built an impressive research library which details how they improved website conversions and sales on different kinds of websites: eCommerce, publishers, lead-gen landing pages, etc.

Conversion Conference

Conversion Conference is the first and only conference dedicated to the art of conversion rate optimization. The next edition will be held in San Francisco in March, 2011.

WhichMVT.com

WhichMVT.com is a site where you can compare different multivariate testing tools (including Visual Website Optimizer). You can also read or leave review of different tools. (Just in case you happen to use VWO and love it, please take 5 minutes out to leave a review here).

Online Behavior

Online Behavior is a new magazine by industry experts which features columns on behavioral targeting, web analytics and testing & optimization. All articles are of top-notch quality. If you are interested in conversion rate optimization, subscribing to their feed is a must.

Get Elastic

GetElastic.com exclusively focuses on conversion rate optimization and a/b split testing for eCommerce websites. It’s a must read blog for anyone even remotely related to an eCommerce business.

Visual Website Optimizer Blog

You knew this was coming, didn’t you? I am very happy that Visual Website Optimizer Blog has seen explosive growth in readership and reach in last couple of months. This blog is not just about product/feature announcements only. Rather majority of posts relate to A/B testing case studies and conversion rate optimization how-tos. All time hits include: landing page optimization tips, impact of SEO on A/B testing, top 10 eCommerce sites (by conversion rate), etc.

Are there any other A/B testing resources that I missed? Please leave a comment below!

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I just published a guest post on Smashing Magazine titled Multivariate Testing in Action: Five Simple Steps to Increase Conversion Rates.

Essentially, there are five steps to increasing conversion rate:

• Identify a challenge
• Define your test hypothesis
• Decide whether to do A/B testing or multivariate testing
• Run the test and analyze results
• Derive lessons from it

If these steps sound complicated to you, I recommend you to read the extensive tutorial which has numerous examples.

My article explains multivariate testing by means of a case study where I tested following variations on a software download page (notice color and text changes):

Can you guess which variation produced maximum downloads? Well, the end result of this test was that #10 combination (in the screenshot above, one with ‘Download for Free’ in red) had 60% improvement in conversion rate. That’s the power of multivariate testing.

Read the full case study and tutorial: Multivariate Testing in Action: Five Simple Steps to Increase Conversion Rates. I hope you like it!

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The Nielson Company regularly releases data for conversion rate of different websites via its MegaView Retail service. The data (as of March 2010) for top 10 online retails by conversion rate is analyzed in this post. The objective of this list is to give you an idea about to what extent these retailers have been able to optimize their conversion rates.

Top 10 websites with highest conversion rate

Note the eligibility criteria for this list: To be considered, e-commerce sites must have had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

Schwan’s: 40.6% conversion rate

Schwans.com is an online grocery store and food delivery business. A conversion rate of 40.6% sounds too good to be real but Schwan’s is an old company which started home deliveries of food in 1952. So, it has a good brand name as far as food delivery is concerned and now most of its customers are simply visiting the website to order the food they want. No wonder, conversion rate is so high!

Woman Within: 25.3% conversion rate

Woman Within offers Plus Sized clothing for women. Note their laser-sharp focus: “plus sized clothing for women” which (combined with large collection and clean site design) is probably the reason for high conversion rate.

Blair.com: 20.4% conversion rate

Blair.com sells clothing online. Just like Schwan’s, Blair.com is also a very old business (started in 1910!). So it has brand and customer base already established and the website serves as a channel for ordering.

1800petmeds.com: 17.7% conversion rate

As its name says, 1800petmeds.com sells pet medication. This eCommerce store is a perfect example of focusing on a niche. I bet they would never see such high conversion rate, if they attempted to sell everything related to pets (food, clothes, grooming products, etc.) The focus of store is pet medication and that’s the reason conversion rate is high. Also note that they have an extensive mini-site on Pet Health education, which probably drives them numerous targeted prospective customers.

Vitacost.com: 16.4% conversion rate

Online store selling vitamin supplies. I love the clean sidebar on the left. The website is bit old-schooled and is optimized for IE (that too for a lower screen resolution). They probably get a lot of non-tech savvy visitors so the sidebar would be very helpful for product selection. This shows how focusing on the customer (and not on the design) can help increase your conversion rates.

The rest 5 ecommerce sites (by conversion rate)

• QVC: 16% conversion rate
• ProFlowers: 15.8% conversion rate
• Office Depot: 15.4% conversion rate
• Oriental Trading Company: 14.9% conversion rate
• Roamans: 14.4% conversion rate

Secret of high conversion rates

Of course, there is no secret for such high conversion rates. These companies have been doing conversion rate optimization for years now and one cannot hope to replicate the same overnight. However, looking at the websites above, I can imagine a few general trends on why they have such high conversion rate:

• Brand Name: many of the websites above are actually an offshoot of already established offline business. And the sites simply serve as a channel to place orders (much like telephone or brick-and-mortar store).
• Laser-focus on a niche: be it pet-medication, plus sized clothing for women or flower deliveries, high conversion rate is possible if the focus of your site is clear and you are attracting the right kind of prospects.
• Interested Visitors: a website or a landing page only does half the job in converting a visitor. The other half of job is done by the traffic source. Theoretically, if you send interested visitors who are ready to make a purchase, a website only has show a purchase form. Most of the websites above has a proven formula for getting interested visitors. (e.g. PPC ads, microsites, display ads or partnerships).

Hope you liked the examples and my analysis. Please leave a comment below if you have any other examples of high converting websites.

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