Lots of people have been in touch about the Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Testing offer I announced yesterday. I thought that maybe a little more background on what testing is, and how it can benefit your site might be useful.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Well at its most literal Conversion Rate Optimisation is the action of improving conversion rates – purchases, sign-ups, clicks, page-views, you name it. If it’s an action it can be optimised to improve the rate at which people perform that action.

Conversion Rate Optimisation is not a new activity. Copy writers and Direct Marketers have been applying CRO for many many years, but in the realm of the Internet CRO has met technology to offer new techniques to test just about every element of the web experience. Now we can test designs, layouts, imagery, copy, buttons, Calls To Action and the inter-relationships web collateral creates to find improved ways to turn web visitors into conversions. And as I mentioned, conversions could be anything that you consider to be positive for your business (I’ve yet to be asked to help hurt a business via testing ).

How Does It Work?

Well there are two distinct elements:

Deciding what to test – this is where human ingenuity comes into play, and a good test consultant can help you identify, through various hypotheses, the elements that might drive higher conversion; and
1. How to test – this is where technology comes into play, and the beauty of the Internet is that the technology is available. After the test is set up the technology takes over and identifies what tested elements have the greatest impact on conversion.

Are there any caveats?

The beauty of the technology available today is that it takes care of serving different content to different visitors, and of measuring the responses to that content. Everything is automated, so you can sit back and watch the results literally in real-time. It does take some time to set up and QA the tests, and the collection of data can take a number of weeks. But when the data is collected the software can tell you what changes had the highest positive outcome on your conversions, and does so with a confidence level of statistical significance.

There is one caveat – testing requires traffic. If your site has low traffic levels, and in particular if the page being tested has less than 100-150 views per day than testing will become exceedingly slow.

How can I learn more about testing?

Here are some handy videos from Google about testing:

I likely wont be using the Google Website Optimizer with the free tests, and instead will use a professional paid tool that returns results in a faster more scalable way.

If you are interested in the free CRO testing please get in touch with me for further information. If you have any questions please leave them below and I’ll try to answer as soon as possible.