Visual Website Optimizer

Traffic coming to a specific blog post rarely goes on to read your other blog posts. A visit to homepage or product page from a blog reader is even rarer. No wonder, blogs have unusually high bounce rates. The Visual Website Optimizer blog gets a ton of traffic, but only a trickle of it ultimately converts into signing up for the free 30 day trial.

Our original blog design is shown below; note that we had a huge ‘I love Split Testing’ heading towards the top of the page. Even though that’s the name of the blog and ideally it should be retained, our hypothesis was that it may actually be acting as an attention barrier. Note that it competes for attention with the top navigation bar which has product logo and other links related to Visual Website Optimizer.

Original blog design (with header) -

Enter ‘Anti A/B testing‘ – removing the top header

We decided to do a simple anti A/B test to increase signups from the visitors (like you) who have come to read articles on this blog. Now, wait, you may ask what exactly an anti A/B test is. Well, it’s nothing but a term we coined to describe a test where you test presence of an element v/s absence of it. In a typical A/B test, you create variations of an element (say headline, call-to-action buttons, images, etc.). However, in an anti A/B test you remove the element altogether and then see the impact on conversions. In our anti-A/B test, we removed the blog header completely. See below how the blog now looks like without the header:

Removed header from blog: +60% increase in signups

Test Results

Guess what? The variation which did not have the blog header increased signups by 60%. And not just the signups, just about every conversion goal that we tracked showed a dramatic improvement. Have a look at the results below:

As you can see, even visits to the main blog page increased by 78% for the variation that did not have the blog header. The overall positive results obtained from the test re-enforced our belief that even small changes on the pages can have dramatic results. (See other A/B and multivariate test case studies for more examples)

Which anti A/B test will you do?

So, next time you think about optimizing one of your pages, try to think about which element on page you can afford to remove. Perhaps it’s the large product screenshot or video that’s hurting the conversions? Or, perhaps it is the trust / secure logo that’s decreasing the conversions?

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We had launched clickmaps and heatmaps for A/B tests recently in Visual Website Optimizer. Since then it has become the most popular feature amongst our users. We aren’t surprised by the success of this new feature because it gives a new angle to A/B test results. While you can always get information about conversion rate, bounce rate and other hard metrics from standard reports, visualizing “hotspots” on a page has a charm of its own.

Based on feedback from a user, we rolled out a new minor feature: consolidated clickmaps. Unlike traditional clickmaps, which show results only for a particular page, this new feature will aggregate click activity on ALL your website pages to show which parts get most clicks. This is useful if you have a website that has common template/theme across different pages (e.g. header, footer, sidebar, product box, etc.). Using consolidated clickmaps, you will be able to see statistics for elements common to your website.

This feature came handy when I analyzed visitor activity on my personal blog. All I had to do was to enter a URL pattern (http://www.paraschopra.com/blog*) which instructed VWO to generate a consolidated heatmap for all blog posts (technical detail: VWO combined heatmap data for all pages matching the URL pattern; * matches anything and that’s why the entered URL pattern matched all blog posts).

Here is the consolidated heatmap for all my blog posts:

Contrast this with a heatmap only for a single post:

As you can see, the consolidated heatmap has much more information than a single blog post heatmap. That is the real utility; you get to observe patterns of visitor behavior across your website which you may have otherwise missed or would require you browsing through tens of different heatmaps and then stitching patterns in your head.

Using this feature, you also get to see consolidated clickmaps. Here is a screenshot:

The consolidated clickmap clearly shows that 10% of all clicks on the page occur on Visual Website Optimizer banner on my blog. Some more statistics from the clickmap:

• Only 5% of all clicks are made to navigate to main blog from a specific blog post (that is why blogs have high bounce rate; visitors are rarely interested in other content on the blog)
• Only 1% of all clicks are made on RSS subscribe links
• From VWO test reports (not shown):
  • 80% of visitors leave the website without making any click
  • Only 0.2% of visitors subscribe to blog updates
  • 1.5% of visitors click on the large Visual Website Optimizer banner in the sidebar

The stats are bit on the lower side but if you observe consolidated heatmap, you will see a lot of click activity on post text. This means that even though visitors aren’t clicking on links, they are still interacting with the post and reading it!

I hope you like the new feature! If you’d like to give it a spin simply login to your account (it is enabled by default for all accounts). Or, if you aren’t an existing user, signup for a 30 day (no-obligations) free trial here.

PS: Technical details. If you are wondering how we are able to generate consolidated heatmap, here is the trick: we don’t store absolute X and Y positions of visitor clicks. Rather we store xpath of the element being clicked. Common elements on the website have same xpath across different pages, hence we are easily able to aggregate that data.

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Answer: none. Using Visual Website Optimizer on my blog, I tested the layout of sidebar to see if it has any effect on bounce rate. Particularly, I tested whether the sidebar in right (default on many blogs) works better than the sidebar on left. The answer for my case turned out to be that it doesn’t really matter. (Though it may differ for you – you should A/B test it, it is really quite simple). Here are the versions I tested:

Control – Sidebar on the right (click to expand)

Variation – Sidebar on the left (click to expand)

Both versions had surprisingly similar engagement rate of around 22%. Engagement rate is inverse of bounce rate, so in a way this means , irrespective of sidebar positioning, bounce rate of my blog remains 78% (quite high, by the way). If you want to see actual results, here they are (click to expand):

Since the test involved changing the layout of blog across all posts, if you are curious that this would have involved digging into WordPress or PHP code – the answer is no. In fact, the took just 5 minutes to implement. Using the advanced code mode of VWO, all I did was to define the Left Sidebar variation with this CSS: #sidebar { float: left; }. Yes, just that! VWO took care of the rest.

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