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3 simple experiments to improve website ROI

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How can you tell whether your latest idea to improve website performance is a stroke of genius or a terrible idea? In most cases, the only way you can know for sure is with hindsight. So, whether you’re trying to increase traffic, engagement, conversion, or all of the above, here are three simple experiments to try.

Placement

Probably the most important element to test out when it comes to placement is your Calls To Action (CTAs).

It’s a simple change, but one that can have a dramatic impact on your conversion rate.

As discussed in a previous blog post, welcome gates (full screen CTAs that appear before the user can see any content) are the most effective CTA, with a conversion rate typically between 10 and 25%.

However, using welcome gates is likely to dramatically increase your bounce rate and can appear spammy, so they are not a suitable option for many businesses.

According to the same stats, the most common placements for CTAs, in the sidebar and at the end of a post, have approximately the same conversion rate – 0.5-1.5%.

However, you might find totally different results when you try it on your site.

That additional 1% gained by moving your CTA from the bottom of your post to the sidebar could be the difference between acquiring an important lead or not, so it’s worth testing to see if it makes a difference!

Wording

This is quite a broad one, as text is likely to make up the majority of your website.

Of course, finding the right keywords for your SEO and PPC is critical to overall website performance, and these topics deserve at least an entire blog post dedicated to tackling them.

However, getting your wording right online is about more than just appealing to search engines and advertising.

What does your human audience respond to? Using formal B2B style language is likely to fall flat if used by a B2C business, and vice versa - but this doesn’t mean you can’t experiment with different voices.

Taking blog posts as an example, which posts do your analytics tools indicate receive the highest levels of engagement? Which get the most views? Try identifying any correlation between success and:

  • Author
  • Topic
  • Writing style
  • The channels through which the blog was promoted

As with any experimentation, be sure to note what works and then repeat it!

Visuals

Returning to the example of the CTA, there are plenty of visual changes that might impact the effectiveness of this button.

Perhaps the most obvious question related to this is ‘which colour for CTAs results in the best conversion rate?’

Well, in this experiment, two pages were created that were completely identical in every way – except the hex value that determined the colour of the CTAs.

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Surprisingly, the page with the red buttons outperformed the one with green buttons by 21%.

While this might not work for every website, it goes to show how powerful a simple A/B test such as this can be for improving conversion rates.

Experimentation best practices

When trying out simple changes like the ones mentioned here, it’s best to only change just one variable at a time.

If you change, say, both the colour and the wording on your CTA and then see an increase in conversions of 15%, how will you know if it was the wording or colour change that caused this change?

Make small, incremental changes and before you know it your website will become a lean, mean, fully optimised high performance machine!

Here at LexisClick, we have the benefit of years of experience testing, tweaking and improving websites and content to generate maximum ROI. If you'd like to leverage our experience to get the most from your marketing budget, get in touch with us via marketing@lexisclick.com or give us a call on 01202 788333.

  

 

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