Prodigy Productions, LLC

Learn software development, computer vision, and A.I. programming.

Home

Optimize Your Site for Better Conversions

On February 5, 2011, in Marketing, SEO, Web Design, by LuCuS

Did you know that the color of your buttons and links can effect how many people click them? It’s true. Just by changing the color of a button on your site, you can either get more clicks or less clicks, depending on the color. But, how do we know which colors work best? What can we do to make sure that we get the most conversions out of our site as possible? In this article, I’ll show you how to test different site layouts and color schemes to determine what works best for your site. After all, more conversions equals more users which ultimately equals more money.

To begin with, what exactly do I mean by “conversions”? In internet marketing, conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions such as registering for a newsletter or site membership, filling out a survey, or even purchasing something available from the website. The conversion rate can be calculated by dividing the number of goal achievements by the number of visits to your website. The goal achievements are completely up to you. Depending on the purpose of your site, goal achievements might simply be to get N number of subscribers to your newsletter or N number of sales in a given time period. Regardless of what your goal achievements are, your main focus is to get the highest conversion rate possible.

To do this, we can begin with a few basic actions. First, you need to make sure that you have your goals clearly defined and you need to stick to them. Having vague goals will always cause your conversion rates to fluctuate as nothing is set in stone. As a test case, we can define a simple goal for obtaining 200 subscribers to our RSS feed and we want to get those subscribers within 1 week. So, we will first get a base reading of how many subscribers we currently have and use that as our base number. We will also record the time and date that we got that base number and will measure out exactly 1 week from that minute. When the week is up, we will take the base line number of subscribers and subtract it from the current number of subscribers. We then take that number and divide it by the number of page visits our site received during that week. This will give us the percentage of visitors that actually converted to subscribers. We can also take the total number of subscribers we got during our test week and divide it by the original number we chose for our goal achievement, in this case 200. Take this number and multiply it times 100. This will give us the percentage of subscribers that met our goals. Here’s an example:

I had an original goal to get 200 new subscribers to my feed within 1 week. However, I only received 75 subscribers. So, here is the formula I would use:

(number of received subscribers / number of expected subscribers) * 100

(75 / 200) * 100 = 37.5%

Now that I have a base metric to go by, I need other test cases to compare it against. But, how do I do that? Well, we can do several things such as moving the feed button to a new location or even changing the color of it. You’ll have to experiment with your options to find out what converts the best. That’s good and all, but I don’t want to have to manually keep up with these experiments. Is there a tool that can help me measure my conversion rates? There sure is.

I want to introduce you to another fine tool called the Google Website Optimizer. This is another free tool that you can get once you’ve registered for a free account with Google. The Google Website Optimizer allows you to create “experiments” for testing conversion rates. It works by building the base metrics for you and then doing some test runs with your current layout. As in the test case above, you would run your experiment for 1 week to get a good base reading. At the end of that week, you would change the layout of your site, change the color of the feed button, etc… and then run the experiment for another week. You can repeat the process for as many experiments as you want and the Google Website Optimizer will give you the conversion rates for each experiment. All you have to do is pick the one that has the highest conversion rate and stick to that design.

In the example we ran before, we got a base conversion rate of only 37.5%. I ran the same test using 4 different colors for my feed button and here were the results.

Original Button Color (Red) = 37.5%
Blue = 52.3%
Green = 20.9%
Orange = 64%

As you can see from my experiments, my subscriber conversion rate jumped from 37.5% to 64%. That means by simply changing the color of my feed button from red to orange, I’m now getting 26.5% more subscribers than I was before. That’s why, if you’ll look in the upper-right hand corner of this page, you’ll notice that my RSS Feed button is now orange whereas it was originally red. Not too bad for a change that only took me 2 seconds to make.

Here’s another experiment you might want to try out. You might want to consider playing around with different site layouts or navigation. Try putting your navigation bar on the left, running a test, and then putting it on the right for another test. One thing to keep in mind though when playing around with site layout is that you’ll need to re-run any previous experiments from before. What worked before might not work the same with a different layout. As in the experiment I ran above, the orange feed button didn’t produce the same results when I had my navigation links on the left as it does with my navigation on the right. Also, having the navigation links on the left didn’t produce as high conversion rates as it does on the right. So, in my case, it was a win-win by putting the navigation on the right and having the feed button orange.

There are plenty of other things you can do for improving your conversion rates. But you always need to remember that just because one experiment produced certain results doesn’t mean that you’ll get the same results for other experiments. For example, just because I got a 64% conversion rate for my feed button being orange doesn’t mean that I got the same results for other buttons on the same page. The same goes for ad placement. Also, you need to keep in mind what works for one website won’t always work for another. So, if you have multiple websites, it’s best that you experiment with both sites instead of just sticking to one and using that same layout and design for both. Be creative and make sure to experiment with as many options as you can come up with.

The last thing you need to remember is that you shouldn’t always experiment with your production website. You are trying to brand yourself & your site and visitors don’t want to constantly see your site undergo several different designs before you finally settle on one. Instead, it’s best if you can setup a “test site” on the side somewhere and get a select number of test users to take it for a test drive for you. Once you find something that does work, swap out your production site with the newly proven site design and make sure to re-check your conversion rates against the real world. If your new design tests poorly in the real world, you might have to go back to the drawing board and experiment with something else.