A great example why web testing works.

Its great getting an ever increasing number of visitors to your site,  but what does it take to get them through to the shopping cart? We’ve recently  integrated a fantastic tool, Visual Website Optimiser, into our platform so our partners can test variations of layout, colours and text to see which customers prefer.

Hows It Work?
AB testing allows you to show visitors to your site different versions of a page. Tracking software can follow the customers journey through the site see what works better.  Its easier to understand with an example so see what happened below:

The BathEmpire Sale Test

A client, Bath Empire, recently launched an amazing sale on the site and the team had  a few ideas over how we should present the savings. Rather than arguing between us which was best we ran a test to see which one worked better for our customers.

In the test we measured:

• Engagement – when people visit the page do they click another link on the page or hit the back button
• Visit Product Page – how many people visit a product page based on the 3 layouts
• Get to Shopping Cart – of these people how  many get to the shopping basket.

Which variation do you think would win?

Be honest, which one would you choose? How big an effect do you think this small change might have had? Our straw poll in the office showed the strike through version (variation 2) was most peoples top tip for winning all categories. As it clearly showed the savings and followed a convention that many other shops online were using.

What did win?

In our test variation 1 was a clear winner, removing the RRP all together had the following effect over the original:

Engage on page:

19% more people interacted with the page

Click through to a product:

80% more people clicked through to a product

Into shopping basket:

377% more people went through to shopping basket

Why?

This was a fairly small test, but my thought is that the winner was down to a less is more approach. By keeping only the key facts in view it reduced confusion working out which was the best deal.

What do you think, I’d love to hear your comments.

Simon…