Wednesday, March 19th, 2008...11:27 am
Conversion Optimization… Or lose your job!
So you have a wife and two kids and you can not afford to lose your job. Good, you are in the same boat as the rest of us. However, if you are a website developer and you are not testing with an optimizing software like Google Website Optimizer you will lose your job, or at least you should. This post talks about the best ways to start testing your site to improve conversion rates, making it impossible for you to be replaced. At the end I will even touch on ways to a promotion, assuming your boss is not a jerk.
If you have ever said the following, ” My website is < insert some claim to complexity>, so there is no way I can test it.” you are wrong. Your website is not too complex to test, you can do it and you should have started months ago. There is a good article by John Quarto-Vontivadar titled The Price of Perfection, which touches on the importance of not lying to yourself and start testing.
What is website optimization?
First, if you are asking this question you are a step ahead of the game. Around 3/4 of e-comerce websites do not optimize their websites, so you are one step closer to increasing your job security. Now, take a look at the resources on the Google’s Website Optimizer website. In summery, you conduct tests to see what causes more users to convert.
Where do I start?
The starting point for college websites is unique in that most college websites lack concrete goals. Read my post on Excellent College Website Goals to learn how to establish goals for your site. For this post I will refer to Future Students section of the website for it is a site with high traffic and common goals for most colleges.
What should I test first?
There are lots of blog posts about what you should test first, here are two resources to help you get started: Prioritize Optimization, Introduction to Website Optimizer Webinar. For your first few tests, go to your future students page and find some major text or photos, then swap them with a couple other versions. Do not do too many versions at first, get a little experience under your belt before you do any complex testing.
What to test for a college website:
- Future Students landing page
- Apply Online buttons
- Request a tour button
- Test, offering incentives for tour request or information request forms
- Test the application process – this is a big one, if your application process is complex you will lose completed applications.
There is no limit to what you can test, so look at your pages and try new ideas. And remember if anyone has an idea during a meeting, do not allow that idea to be wasted. Just say you will test it to see if it increases your conversion rates.
So you don’t just want to keep your job, you want a promotion!
Now this is where optimization gets interesting, you want to increase user satisfaction so how can you do it, well a survey is the only real way to see if your users are enjoying the experience. How are you supposed to test if people are enjoying one version of the site or another?
This is more complex and less objective then normal optimization tests but in no way should this be ignored for college websites. Because every college website should have a goal of user satisfaction, often times it is difficult to find a goal page for a certain site, like the advisement office site.
How to execute it: simply create an a/b test with 2 versions of the page, and use any page as the goal page. Then include different surveys with the same exact questions, i.e. the same survey but the results go to different locations. This test will take a while to execute because you need enough data to have reliable information. Run the test until you feel there is significant data, best is 2 weeks to 6 weeks. Keep the surveys short no more than 6 questions, and one should be “What is your overall opinion of the site?” You can also use 4Q, which is a decent survey for such a test.
Optimize now and forever
Your site should constantly be tested and optimized. Your users change year after year and what might increase your conversions one year can decrease them the next. It can even be seasonal, don’t keep snowflakes on your page from a test in November when it is July.
16 Comments
September 13th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Oh well, my colleagues have introduced an Designer Belt online store. They said that price and quality are very good. Can you give me more suggestions?
April 16th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Hi. good info. It’s kinda interesting though, that most people do everything by hand. Really! For somethings it’s just obvious that it should, like ppc and seo. really!
April 17th, 2010 at 5:20 am
online business advertising and marketing is really essentially all about the numbers of other url pages linking to you. without the benefit of those same inbound links you’re dead in the water. this dawned on me not long after registering with what is for me the most powerful semi-automatic backlink building software system available on the market … promoting website
April 20th, 2010 at 2:32 am
What exactly do you think is the easiest weblog application to make use of for a person which has a very reduced knowledge of technologies?
April 30th, 2010 at 3:48 pm
I wouldn’t buy more than you need to start off with, start off with a shared hosting plan . Once it starts getting more popular, and you actually need to move, then you can upgrade to a VPS, then a dedicated. I don’t see any need to skip steps when you are starting out from new. It’s easy enough to switch hosting, to a different provider or to upgrade to a different platform. You’ll still be able to upgrade pretty quick between platforms, just to make sure to keep an eye on your growth and then a little bit of comfort room in your estimates/calculations.
May 2nd, 2010 at 12:22 pm
it is my first reply on this blog and in the begining I would like to thank for the great information, which I found in this and all previous topics , it really helped me very much. I will definitely add this website on my google reader
Also, I would like to ask – don’t you mind if I will quate some information from your website because I am writing articles for the Bukisa, Ezine and other articles directories (this is my part time job)? It would really help me with some of mine articles. Of course, I will mention your website name or URL (not all articles directories allows URL’s , so I can’t 100% promise that you will get a direct link to your website).
May 9th, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Applying the proper internet marking strategy can be your ticket to a successful business venture. Because the internet has been an reciprocal means of making future clients and getting sales, employing the correct online marketing scheme can make the difference when it comes to your business project. The things that you have to think when making the conclusion of which marketing strategy to practice is whether or not it will be advantageous for your business.
May 14th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Is it true that google detects if you have too many back links
May 20th, 2010 at 5:18 am
This is simply just awesome information, bookmarked so I can find my way back here, thumbs up to the mods of this blog, thank you. – Offshore Company Formation
May 22nd, 2010 at 4:48 pm
This is a great article and it was very interesting to read.
July 11th, 2010 at 12:14 am
Hello dude How are You ? I like your post and i want to stumble it for my friend but i cant see your social bookmark widget in this blog. Please help me friend Thanks
July 12th, 2010 at 4:40 am
Haloadmin I love with ur news . May i save this posting for my examination ? thank you admin
July 30th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Hello, I am aware this is perhaps somewhat strange to read, but it is posts like these that helps me to get through the day, when my boss is getting on my nerves every single waking minute! Some of my friends told me about it but I did not find it for some time, so a couple days back you can imagine how pleased I was to finally find it! Myself, I don’t do much blogging due to time constraints nonetheless I do love to read other people’s work. I just had to comment to show my appreciation for your entries and I also wanted to say that so many authors don’t get any credit for their craft, credit that is, in my opinion well deserved. Given the topic you might not believe me and perhaps doubt that any person could like it so much, but I truly wish for you to continue as you began. It’s great!
August 6th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Thanks for this post, just what i was looking for and worked like a charm.
August 10th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Hiya , I spottet a excellent way to make alot of money online writing blogs. I expect this is probably for the website administrator but there are probably more bloggers reading this. I have made thousands using the techniques detailed in the product and it has only been 2 months. Free Money Making Blog By Blogging To The Bank
August 17th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Almost everyone that earnsmoney on the internet (even the millionaires) do so through affiliate marketing. Being successful in affiliate marketing involves applying the formula that makes other affiliate marketers successful. For instance, autoblogging. Autoblogging is one of the least well-known forms of making money on the internet for quite some time… basically because it’s quite difficult to make a good auto-blog. Yet, when done right, it can provide you with a constant passive income with the only real work required being the setting up process. Video Marketing, and several other marketing strategies are all designed to drive traffic to your site, can be incorporated gradually in order to raise the position your site appears in the search engine results page when someone searches for a term related to your site. And yet, even this can be totally automated.
Leave a Reply