Just A Sight Change On A Web Page Can Make A Huge Difference

Written by Jerry Crockford Wednesday, 20 April 2011 08:48

As a marketer, you want to be sure that you take every opportunity to test your advertising to make sure you are not missing out on opportunities. If a different offer or price break can improve sales, you want to be sure you know about it. And that means testing.

As a marketer, you want to be sure that you take every opportunity to test your advertising to make sure you are not missing out on opportunities. If a different offer or price break can improve sales, you want to be sure you know about it. And that means testing.

When trying to test an offer or a headline in a newspaper (making changes from one week to the next), there are so many external factors that can skew your findings. Competitor activity, placement within the publication, even news and current events will have a bearing. This means it is always going to be an inaccurate science.

Online testing however, opens up an entirely different playing field. The instantaneous nature of the Internet means you can test with absolute accuracy - finding out how even a subtle change impacts on the reactions and responses of your market.

Here's an example...

A business owner called to talk about his website. He manufactured and retailed tents. He had had a limited amount of SEO work done on his existing site, and although it was for a narrow band of keywords, there was traffic coming in - but few enquiries.

He needed a new website, HOWEVER as camping is a seasonal activity, (It was peak season) he didn't want to wait until we built the new site from scratch, and asked if we could look at tuning up his existing site in the short term.

At first glance, the website looks pretty good. It feels/looks about right for its market. The navigation is clear. The content is reasonably well typeset, although a few sub-heads to break the text wouldn't have hurt. Still, as websites go, it was pretty good.

What then, was causing the poor performance?

Firstly, there was little cross-linking in the site. There were no 'attention getters' to pull visitors to other pages and find out more about products that were available. This was borne out with analytics showing that people didn't get around much within the site.

With regard to traffic, there were about 1,200 hits per month. When you consider that he was a local business, and was optimised for only a few keywords, this was quite an acceptable starting point. Most importantly, all of the keywords had been well thought out, and the correct kind of prospects were being attracted to the website.

In some cases, a website can have good traffic but it is the WRONG type of traffic. This occurs when the keywords are targeting the wrong sector in the market. In this instance however, the research done for keywords was quite sound, and the traffic was from people who were likely to be good quality prospects for the business.

The area that was the largest problem was the "contact us" page. From the traffic to the site, around 375 people were clicking through to this particular page, and yet there were very few online enquiries being delivered via the email system. Had people been picking up the phone and calling from the number on that page, it would be acceptable, HOWEVER, this didn't seem to be the case.

This is of some concern, as you don't go to a "contact us" page to browse. You go there for a purpose and that is to make contact. So the question is, what's happening to those people who clicked through to that page?

With the camping season being at its peak, it was important that we did whatever we could right NOW to see if the site could be improved. This meant breaking one of our rules, when it comes to website optimisation, and that is to only make ONE change at a time. By taking it gently in this way you can identify which change was the one that ACTUALLY made the difference.

1. Took the 'mandatory' setting off the phone number on the form and

2. Moved the form to the TOP of the page, above the fold.

The difference was quite remarkable. That week, of 90 people who clicked through to the Contact Us page, around 55 of them filled out the form and placed a solid enquiry. This is a great illustration of the instantaneous nature of the Internet when it comes to measuring changes that are made in a marketing strategy. There is just no way that you could get that type of result from monitoring advertisements in magazines or newspapers!