What do you want your visitors to do on your website?
Split testing and web page optimization
Hello to all of you, web analytics aficionados, who made it through the first five lessons of Learning Web Analytics and are still thirsty for more insights from my Logaholic Self Hosted Edition diary.
This diary revolves around the five W’s of Web Analytics and over the past five weeks I answered the Who, Where and What questions of your web analytics software, by using Logaholic as a point of reference.
Last week’s question was: What are your visitors doing on your website and (hopefully) from my post you learned which Logaholic reports help you answer it. However, since from the very beginning of this diary I am preaching “actionable analytics” I will fail to walk my talk If I don’t explain you how to take advantage of certain tools in Logaholic which will help you get your site visitors do what you want them to do. Hence the title of this post 😉
In my previous post you learned how to discover your ‘‘golden paths” by using the Road to Sales report. Here I will explain you how you can test one page against another to discover which one brings more conversions.
Split test it
This is one of the many reasons to start exploiting the useful Test Centre tool in Logaholic. Here you can set up a URL or a PHP split test. In a URL split test you choose a certain target file and compare the conversion rates of two pages that lead to it.
The output of the URL split test will depend on the difference in the page conversions. If Logaholic finds the difference to be significant, you will have a “winner” page: A or B. If there is too little difference in the page conversion rates the test will be “Inconclusive”.
And optimize it…
In the case of a winner, the next step will be to make the winner page more prominent to your visitors. There are different ways to improve the visibility of this page in terms of design: thicker letters on the link, another picture, change the position of the link, etc. You want to take full advantage of the fact that this page is important to your visitors and sways their decision to the positive when considering whether to buy your product.
bit by bit...
For those of you, whom Logaholic disappointed with an “Inconclusive” result of the URL split test, the fun just begins. My advice is to find a way to optimize both the pages you are comparing, so that their visibility to your visitors increases. I know, this requires a lot of work but in the end you will reap the fruits of your labour. Here’s the simplest way to do it:
- Focus on each page separately and see how you can optimize its visibility. Take one of the pages and see what changes you can make to it to make it more prominent, then run a PHP split test to see which version yields more conversions. (for info on PHP split testing see the manual and the video on our website).
- Do the same for the other page, and then URL split test again with the target file.
…until you get there!
This testing exercise will put you back on the road to sales. It simply means that you will do yourself a big favor by navigating your customers better to the target files on your site and increasing your page conversions.