Web Analytics India

A/B Tests Prove The Effectiveness Of Good Web Design And Content

Split testing your ads or marketing content is a proven way to choose content and design that gives a higher ROI. This age old practice can be effectively used to convert a good webpage into a great, money pulling machine. These changes can be minute or almost unnoticeable but the effects may be huge and importantly profitable. Here is a list of some real tests done which clearly proves this point.

How effective are words?

A website on diabetics read as “Keeping tab on your diabetes just got a lot easier” and below this headline they put a join in button.

Later they changed the headline as “Maintain Your Optimal Health by Keeping Tabs on Your Diabetes” and highlighted the “Optimal Health” in green colour. All other design and content in the site remained the same.

The second one outperformed the first design and brought in a 33% increase in the conversion rate. The reason should be clear by now; the second headline adds a pain point by directly mentioning the health factor.

Source: http://dmix.ca/2010/05/how-we-increased-our-conversion-rate-by-72/

Highlighting the wrong word

This is a small but effective example of highlighting the wrong word. A freelance blog writer in his web page asked his visitors to follow him on twitter. The text read:

“I’m on twitter”. And the word twitter had a hyperlink. The conversion rate was at 4.7%.

Later this call for action was changed to: “Follow me on twitter here” and this time the hyperlink was on “here”. The conversion rate jumped to 12.8%.

This clearly shows the power of words and the impact they create on the minds of the reader.

Source: http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

Clarity and focus in design

Most sites equally project all the elements in the web page and this leads to low conversion rates. For instance, a webpage offering an online training program packed its website with four equally visible buttons about the details, and one among them had a call for action link of “register for the online course”. This design could not get them desired results.

Later they reduced the size and prominence of the other three elements and increased the size and changed the colour of the call for action button and this immediately increased their conversions by over 15%.

Lengthy form fields

Whenever you need your visitor to sign up for your service or free trail make sure that you are not making him fill lengthy forms. Surveys have suggested that, just the view of a lengthy form will make the visitor move away from the page. So keep it short and easy, it will pull a clear 50% more. Also make it a point to give pre-filled options for fields like country name, city, state, etc. instead of asking the visitor to enter his complete address.

Benefits should be clearly communicated

Even if you offer your service for FREE, without communicating the benefits you will hardly find prospects pouring in. Every call for action should begin with strong reasons for the visitor to sign up. So instead of just saying “Signup for our free bookkeeping software”, say

“Now get relieved of all the manual paper based accounting with our free bookkeeping software.”

You can quote as much benefits as you want before the call for action.

Source: http://www.abtests.com

Make them feel your product

Let your visitor experience your product.

A website promoting a book managed to pull in 35% more buyers by just putting a 3D image of the book, their initial promotion just had the title of the book. This small change made all the difference.

The secret is the experience you give the visitor about your product visually in their minds.

Source: http://codemonkeyism.com/ab-testing-download-landing-pages/

Reduce bounce rate by making it interesting

Do not design your website in the expected lines. For instance, a website promoting online books/CDs/films showed its collection in a straight line format with the details of the titles below each image.

Later on they changed the view as spines and when the visitor hovers over them the details get displayed. This looked quite different and the visitors played around with these images and spent time looking at the details.

This not only reduced the bounce rate by over 10% but also brought in a 15% more conversion.

Source: http://www.rowtheboat.com/archives/39

Conclusion

A/B tests can be effectively used to deduce the best web page design and content combination for your site. The only thing that you should be doing is to try it.