Ideas are powerful - you don’t need to watch Inception to know that, either. Results released by Microsoft, Amazon and Google indicate most of their ideas to improve their websites have failed to improve the metrics they were designed to lift.

Here are the results: Read more →

Conversion rates can change day to day without any definite explanation - and someone in your organisation, comparing time periods might ask you – “Why isn’t our conversion rate X% higher as you said it would be?” Or worse yet - “Why haven’t we seen any lift in our Google Analytics conversion rate?”

I’m going to show you how you can easily present lift in a conversion rate optimisation campaign, in laymans terms. How it works: Read more →

While there’s some consensus that conversion rates should be measured by unique visitors, in some industries it can be naive to ignore a conversion rate calculated based on visits - especially under (very rare) specific circumstances. Tools like Google Website Optimizer rely solely on unique visitors, meanwhile Google Analytics relies upon visits to calculate conversion rates.

Let’s see why this is a problem…

First, an example

Let’s say you’ve built a fantastic site about health insurance and you’re testing three different variations. Google Website Optimizer (using unique visitors to calculate its conversion rate) tells you there are no winners.

In your own investigation however, Google Analytics’ goal conversion rates shows one variation performing dramatically better. You might end up with the following scenarios:

Assuming one variation increases the number of visits that each visitor makes to the site and another variation decreases the number of visits to the site, this could result in a higher or lower CPA (if visitors return to the site through a costly medium such as PPC). But you wouldn’t see this in Google Website Optimizer! Check out the difference in CPA that could be achieved here (yes it’s drastic, but it proves a point):

While GWO shows no clear winner calculating conversion rate on unique visits, an conversion rate calculated using visits (or clicks) might show a different winner in terms of CPA

Worse yet… You might place yourself in the position where Google Website Optimizer tells you one thing and Google Analytics tells you another thing:

In the example above, whilst “Visits CR Low” looks nice in GWO, you’d be better off choosing the losing variation.

Assumptions in the cases above

The examples above make a number of assumptions:

1. Subsequent visits return to the site through branded search (not resuming their session after having their cookies expire)
2. The number of return visits increases significantly
3. CPCs are unforgivably high
4. You’re heavily CPA driven

Likelihood of encountering this?

This is a very rare circumstance. In fact, I’ve encountered only one or two sites where this is of SOME concern. If you’re in doubt, you’re most likely going to want to measure your website’s conversion rate in terms of unique visitors.

How can you measure/keep-an-eye-on this?

First you’ll need to start tracking your Google Website Optimizer tests in Google Analytics and second…

Well to tell you the truth, I don’t know how to measure this very accurately myself.

Any ideas?

I see a lot of people who start off in conversion optimisation making several critical mistakes when choosing what to test.

Here are a few that I see frequently:

• Testing content or elements that are meaningless to customers
• Making small changes and expecting the world
• Running a test in a low trafficked part of the site
• Testing parts of the site that already work well before solving huge problems in the funnel
• Testing aimlessly around the site
• Testing without a clear objective

These are all big mistakes but at least they’re testing. Read more →

So, you’ve run a couple of tests and noticed a 30% increase in your conversion rate. Where’s that 30% extra revenue per month? Google Website Optimizer tells you that the test won with 98% “confidence” that it won. Come on!

Believe it or not, there can be a number of things at play here. Let’s take a look at them: Read more →

Displaying experiment data in Google Analytics from Google Website Optimizer is extremely straightforward to do. You might have found my other post on integrating Google Website Optimizer MVT with Google Analytics and were curious as to how you could integrate it with Google Analytics.

The truth is though, this may not be what you anticipated. Read more →

A lot of websites advocate that you MUST TEST EVERYTHING. While this makes a lot of sense, it shouldn’t be followed blindly in all cases. Like many rules such as this, you get the best results when you know when to break them. Here’s why…

Read more →

With a simple browser plugin, you can find out if your competitors are using Google Website Optimizer. But what it can’t do, is show you what they’re testing.

Here, I’m going to show you how you can see exactly what your competitors are testing on their sites.

Sneaky? A little. Smart? Totally.

What you need

Here’s what you’re going to need: Read more →

Since conversion optimisation is a relatively under-developed field on the web (at least in Australia), I’m doing a little bit of research to try and find out what people generally think conversion optimisation is about. This should help me understand what level of posts I should be publishing.

Share Your Answers

Anyway, please copy and paste the questions into the comments below and let me know your thoughts:

1. What does conversion optimisation involve?
2. How do you measure success?
3. What is the appeal of conversion optimisation?

Thanks for Your Time…

All the big guys do behavioural targeting - so why don’t you? Too expensive? Too difficult? Pffft… Did you know you can set this up for free?

Introducing BT Buckets

BT Buckets is a new service that allows you to target content to visitors based on their previous behaviours on your site. Here’s how easy it is to segment (or place your visitors into a bucket): Read more →