As 2016 approaches, and we prepare to bid adieu to 2015, we took the time to look back and reflect on everything we’ve learned and written about this past year.

2015 was filled with guides to AB Testing, UX Design, and Psychological triggers. We dug deeper into landing page optimization, ecommerce, mobile and b2b optimization, everything we learned throughout the years from working with our customers and running countless AB tests.

To summarize this year, lets take a look at the most read, shared and debated Conversioner posts we’ve had and take a look at the year to come. *drum roll please*

#1. 26 Pricing Page Examples and Best Practices

Pricing has been the top question on everybody’s mind this year. The pricing page is that one place where your visitor decides to take that next step and put their trust in you and decide whether to invest their time and money in your business. How do you design a pricing page that helps your customer achieve their goals and increases your sales?  This post observes the most important elements of a pricing page, from strategy to messaging, design and AB testing. Checkout the in-depth analysis of 26 different pricing pages and learn how to optimize yours or create a new one from scratch.If you are going through this process, this is the post for you. And if you already have a great pricing page, perhaps you can make it even better! See how it compares to this list and if there’s something you can optimize (trick question! there’s always something you can optimize!).

2. 10 Psychological Triggers to Boost Revenues

Well, by now, thanks to Dan Ariely and his peers,  we know that we’re completely irrational beings and that different triggers affect our decision making process. Check out these 10 psychological triggers you can start using on your site to increase your revenues.

3. Boost eCommerce Conversion Rate: 30 Best Practices and Tips

e-Commerce was all the rage in 2015, and we have a feeling it’ll just keep going through 2016 as well. In this post, you learn 30 great tips on how to increase your ecommerce conversion rate, including tips about color, where to optimize, call to actions, personalization, emotional targeting, and forms. So if you missed this post, enter the new year prepared and read up on the greatest tips and tricks to improve your ecommerce site.

4. A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding UX Design

Sometimes we get lost in all of these shortened acronyms, so here’s a reminder of what UX stands for – User Experience. When you’re working towards increasing conversions, you are focusing on the benefits of the user- and you are doing this with imagery, with the copy. But the overall design has to keep the user in mind as well – and that’s a whole field in and of itself. But we wrote a beginner’s guide with you to get you started. It includes sources and tools that can get you started on the road to creating a great user experience for your visitors.

5. Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Marketing Persona

One point that comes up consistently throughout conversion optimization is -before matching your design, imagery, copy, and color to your customers – you have to know your target audience. And in order to really know and understand your target audience, you should build marketing personas. So here’s the play-by-play on how to go about doing that.

6. Speaking with Emotion: How to Increase Conversions with Words

The words we use have a powerful effect on the people around us. Online words are one of the main ways we communicate with our visitors. Check out this in-depth guide of words that can help you trigger the right emotions in your target audience.

7. 10 Landing Page Examples to Increase Sales

If you love landing pages like we love landing pages, you are going to love this post. It has some great examples on how to take your landing pages to the next level and increase sales. See what the best and worst companies are doing and how to apply these lessons to your landing page.

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8. 42 Mobile Landing Page Optimization Tips

I don’t know if you’ve heard but – Mobile is the new Desktop, and 2015 took mobile to the next level. Over 51% of internet browsing is now done on our mobile devices, and in 2015, statistics show that  2 billion smartphones have been purchased in the world! So it’s time to stop ignoring those small screens and start giving those mobile visitors more attention. In lieu of these findings, we wrote a detailed post filled with different tips on how to optimize your mobile landing page and increase conversions.

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9. AB Test Checklist: Everything You Need to Check Before Launching

You can’t optimize without testing, but how do you know you’re testing what you wanted to test, and that you’re doing it the right way? With all the different tools and different changes you’ve made, how do you know it’s going to go well? Here’s an All-Inclusive Checklist to end all Checklists that you should go through before you hit that “Start Experiment” button.

10. How to Consistently Grow Your Conversion Rates with Emotional Targeting

Last but definitely not least – how to grow conversion rates with emotional targeting. We wouldn’t be ourselves if we didn’t discuss emotional targeting, how to use it as a strategy, and how that, in turn, will increase your conversions. Read it here and learn how to take all those different posts on UX design, emotion-driving words, color psychology, marketing personas and A/B testing, to implement them into your strategy to create incredibly effective landing pages, pricing pages, and more.

We hope you’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from the posts over the last year – these 10 and many others – and are seeing your conversion rates grow. 2015 was a fantastic year for conversion optimization growth and development, as well as for mobile!  We are excited for what 2016 has in store! Prepare yourself for exciting and detailed posts on analytics, personalization technology advancement tools for both desktop and mobile, heatmaps and of course, more posts on emotional targeting!

As psychology researchers continue to learn about the human mind, as technology continues to advance, and as the interactions of humans with technology continue to change, we will continue to learn and update you with different ways to improve your conversion rates.

A New Year’s Gift From Us to You:

In honor of the new year, Banana Splash (our favorite mobile personalization tool) is offering all of our loyal Conversioner readers a 14 day free trial and a 20% discount for your first 3 months of membership! Just put in the code: conv20

 

Oftentimes the hardest part of testing is deciding what needs optimizing and where to get started. As a matter of a fact, 63% of marketers optimize websites based on intuition (MarketingSherpa). There are many ways and techniques to locating the leaks in a funnel, finding the pitfalls and then testing them. Fortunately we have a few experts who are happy to share their insights and AB testing tips for deciding what to test, and where to start.

To get us started, Jeffrey Eisenberg dives into a 3 step process which will help you locate your customer’s pain points and prioritizes tests according to impact and resources.

 Jeffrey Eisenberg

The CEO of BuyerLegends co-authored “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?” and “Call To Action” both Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling books. He has trained and advised companies like HP, Google and NBC Universal to implement digital marketing strategies emphasizing optimization of revenue conversion rates for engagements, leads, subscriptions, and sales.

“We have a 3-step process we use as part of our Buyer Legends process.

1. Pre-mortem
2. Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimization
3. Scoring Priorities

Of course, you cannot start the 3-step process without first creating actionable personas based on qualitative and quantitative data. Buyer Legends employ storytelling to optimize customer experiences.

Why do we focus on customer experience? We wrote in 2001 that conversion rates are a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take. They’re a reflection of your effectiveness at satisfying customers. For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs.

“For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs.”

Pre-mortem

The reality is that most companies lose more sales every day than they make. If you are converting less than 15% you need to evaluate what is broken in your customer experience.

Get to the bottom of what is going wrong, and plan to get it right. That is why, hands down, the pre-mortem step is the most impactful step of our Buyer Legends process. In fact, rarely does this exercise fail to produce at least one a-ha moment for our clients.  When you imagine the sale is already dead it frees up all the mental energy that you used to try and get the sale and points it at all the potential pitfalls and problems in your experience.

Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimization

After you perform your pre-mortem you will likely end up with a long list of potential proof of Murphy’s law, but not everything on your list is equal.  Some thing are worth your effort some are not.  In my work with clients we often use Eisenberg’s Hierarchy of Optimization to separate the more pressing issues from the tinier ones.

First sort the list of problems into the follow categories:

• Functional. Does this product/service do what the prospect needs? How easy is it for a prospect to determine this?
• Accessible. Can she access it? What are the barriers to her ability to realize the need? Is it affordable, reasonable, and findable?
• Usable. Is it user-friendly? Are there obstacles?
• Intuitive. Does the sales process/Web site feel intuitive and natural based on her buying preferences? Is she forced to endure unnatural buying modalities to realize her need?
• Persuasive. Does she want it? Does she truly understand if it fills her need or solves her problem? Is her expectation reasonable? Will she be delighted?

Once they are sorted simply work your way up the pyramid.  Again, remember not every problem is in search of a solution, and you should focus on the problems that are likely to impact the most customers, and problems that you can actually fix. Be practical, don’t get caught up in the problems you can’t fix.

Scoring Priorities

Let’s consider another simple system to enable your organization to prioritize more effectively when planning tests. The system is based on prioritizing all your planned efforts by three factors with  a score from 1 to 5, with 5 being the best and 1 being the worse:

1. Time – How long will it take to execute a project (a change, a test, or full scale roll-out) until its completion? This includes staff hours/days to execute and the number of calendar days until the project’s impact would be recognized. A score of 5 would be given to a project that takes the minimal amount of time to execute and to realize the impact.
2. Impact – The amount of revenue potential (or reduced costs) from the execution of your project. Will the project impact all of your customers or only certain segments? Will it increase conversion rates by 1 percent or by 20 percent? A score of 5 is for projects that have the greatest lift or cost reduction potential.
3. Resources – The associated costs (people, tools, space, etc.) needed to execute a project. Keep in mind: No matter how good a project is, it will not succeed if you do not have resources to execute an initiative. A score of 5 is given when resources needed are few and are available for the project.

Next, take each factor and multiply them (don’t add them because these factors are orthogonal) for each project. The best possible score is 125 (5x5x5). Tackle and complete the highest-ranking projects first. Meet weekly with a cross-functional group to evaluate the status of each project. Be prepared to re-prioritize regularly; once a month or at least once a quarter.”

Tiffany daSilva dives deeper into buyer personalities and how she uses them to find the important leaks in the funnel and address them:

Tiffany daSilva

is a full stack marketer who has spent the last 10 years working on over 350 websites. Her past includes Geosign, Achievers, & Shopify and is currently the Director of Strategy at Powered by Search. Tiffany was named one of the Techwomen Canada of 2012 and can be seen speaking about marketing at events such as Unbounce’s CTA Conference, PPC Hero London, and 500Startups growth conference.

“I like to first look at data to understand what’s happening behind the scenes, the first metrics I look at are:

1. Time on site
2. Frequency
3. Mobile devices
4. and the usual paths users follow.

From there I go to user testing where I try to find people with different buyer personalities:

• Competitive: Logical and Fast Thinkers who tend to move through the site quickly because they know what they want.
• Methodical: Logical and Slow Thinkers who tend to read all the fine print (even privacy policies) to ensure that they know all the details before making a choice.
• Humanistic: Emotional & Slow Thinkers who take the time to read reviews, testimonials and ask their friends. They want to know what others think about the product before they make their decision.
• Spontaneous: Emotional & Fast Thinkers, they think with their gut but also love to play with things so finding things that might “distract” them in the right direction like check marks, lists, tours of the site, and quizzes will help them convert easier.

These personalities help me see how they move around the site, what areas they focus on more and what they think is missing from the site.

When it’s time to start my test I make sure that I have a hypothesis. Knowing what you’re going to test is very different than hypothesizing what your outcome is. By creating your hypothesis you’re essentially saying,

“I believe version X will beat version Y by __%.”

A few things happen when you do this:

1. You learn what works and what doesn’t because you’re invested in the outcome.
2. You’ve created your requirements. If you decide that version X will beat version y by 15% and it only beats it by 2%, than it’s not enough of a difference and you can go back and redo the test. Deciding what your goals are before hand will keep you honest, and make your tests bigger and better over time.
3. By setting out what you want your test to look like, you can ensure that your testing tool or analytics is set up in such a way that you will be able to measure the test. For example: If you say that version X will beat version Y’s conversion rate by 15%. You can run through your testing software, Adwords account or Analytics to ensure that this information is readily available to you.

Joanna Wiebe

is a conversion copywriter and the co-creator of Copy Hackers and Airstory, she is also one of my favorite writers and I strongly recommend you take her copy writing course.

“I work with a lot of tech businesses, and they tend to follow Dave McClure’s pirate metrics (AARRR) for growth:

1. Acquisition (sign-up)
2. Activation (use product)
3. Retention (keep using product)
4. Referral (tell others to use)
5. Revenue (pay for it)

We start by identifying the metric that is most off-target or most in need of optimization. Perhaps we see in our reporting that Acquisition, Activation and Retention are on track against goals right now but Referral and Revenue are flat or trending down. We work with the business to identify which of the two – Referral or Revenue – make the most sense to focus on optimizing, based largely on their business strategy and goals.

Let’s say they select Referral. Okay, now we need to find out what might be broken, not built, poorly executed, etc that’s potentially suppressing referrals. So we:

• Identify and document the tactics in play to generate referrals
• Analyze those tactics to find lower-hanging fruit; this is where analytics for web, email and the app come in especially handy
• Brainstorm overlooked referral opportunities (e.g., new and proven ways other businesses are getting referrals)
• Interview existing users to learn what’s keeping them from referring

Out of this exercise, we get not just split-testing ideas and food for hypotheses but also other growth hacks to boost referrals – like contests to run, businesses to partner with, content to create and repurpose, and apps and widgets to build.

To prioritize the lower-hanging fruit, we create a roadmap divided by channel: test these things in this order for user emails, test these things in this order for in-app prompts, test these things in this order in remarketing ads. Importantly, the roadmap has checkpoints at the end of each experiment so we can learn and apply what we learn to hypotheses for the next test on the map.

Peep Laja

is the founder of ConversionXL, and is one of the leading conversion optimization experts in the world. He helps companies grow via his conversion optimization agency, courses and coaching program. Take his free CRO course here.

“Figuring out what to AB test is the most difficult part of CRO – it’s what separates the pros from wannabes. If the site is terrible, it’s not very hard to come up with fixes, but if it’s decent or already well optimized, you have to have a data-driven process. I use ResearchXL framework to gather 6 types of data input to identify the problems the website has:

1. Technical analysis
2. Heuristic analysis
3. Digital analytics
4. Qualitative surveys
5. User testing
6. Mouse tracking

Where is it leaking money the most? What is the problem? What’s the discrepancy between what users want and how the website is? Once you know what the problems are, and are able to prioritize the issues (from major issues that affect a large number of users to minor usability issues), coming up with test hypotheses to address them becomes so much easier.

Next step: I figure out how many variations I can test against the control (depends on the transaction volume), and come up with as many different treatment alternatives as I can. Depending on the scope of changes, I might do a wireframe of the treatment, or just add annotations onto the screenshot of the Control – and then send it off to my front-end developer. If the changes are more radical, we might need a designer to be involved before coding up the test. One thing is for sure – speed of implementation (getting the test ready to go) is super important. We can not waste a day.

As Peep points out, the most difficult part of CRO is figuring out what to test. Which is why a huge part of our work at Conversioner is spent on understanding the data, the customer’s emotional needs and finding the point in which we can have the most impact.

Talia Wolf

As Founder and CEO of Conversioner, I help businesses build and execute their conversion optimization strategies, using emotional targeting, consumer psychology and behavioral data to generate more revenues, leads, engagement and sales.

For us, figuring out what to test is a two-step process. First, running an in-depth analysis of the funnel and understanding key behavior of customers. Using heatmaps, Google Analytics, surveys and any other analytical tool that can help discover the crucial pain points within a funnel that need optimizing and if optimized, can have a large impact on bottom line results. Next, once we’ve found the pain points within the funnel, is time to identify what the problem is and come up with hypotheses of how to fix it.

This is when a second step comes in: emotional targeting research. We dive into customer profiling,building personas, mapping out the customer journey and the emotional needs of the potential customers. Understanding the sate of mind a customer is in throughout each step of the funnel, running competitor research, SWOT analysis, market and trends research all help us identify the customer’s emotional triggers, their story and come up with a few hypotheses to test.

Once we have built these hypotheses the next step is presenting them to the team, getting everyone on board to ensure we’re all on the same page, creating the test (usually a more strategic test) and launching as soon as possible. For us, the first test for us is just part of the initial research, giving us indication if we’re on the right track and if we’re testing the right stuff.

Using Peep Laja’s process, Tommy’s ultimate goal is to build a plan that starts with low investment/high-reward and to prioritize tests from there.

Tommy Walker

is the Editor-in-Chief of the Shopify Plus blog. It is his goal to provide high-volume ecommerce stores with deeply researched, honest advice for growing their customer base, revenues and profits.

“For example, if a page with high-traffic & relatively high conversions has a slower load time, why do a radical redesign of the page, when you could look for ways to increase the page’s load speed or time to interaction? Once you’ve taken the time to put together a list of these insights, the question of “what to test first” is really a question of “what can I get away with without having to ask permission?” “

Within most organizations, people like the ​_idea_​ of being data driven to run tests (as long as they’re not the ones collecting the data), but when it actually comes time to test execution, everyone suddenly has an opinion, whether they’ve paid attention to the data or not. Most tests get shot down because of internal politics, not for impact potential, so just be aware.

So, “what to test first” really comes down to being able to gradually build up to the pages that have more stakeholders and require more resources. Essentially, you’re just trying to build a case that says “My research identified X,Y & Z problems on these pages, we had these hypotheses which turned out to be correct, made this much more revenue, and now I’d like to test these hypotheses on these higher priority pages, based on X,Y,Z things I’ve found here.”

CRO is as much (if not more) a game of politics as it is a game of statistics and insights. More tests die because someone internally shut it down, than from actual ability to drive revenue or change. So you need to do what you can early on to build trust in the process and ability to drive change.

Sujan Patel has his own methods and tools to formulating testing ideas and executing them.

Sujan Patel

has 12 years of experience in digital marketing and co-founded Content Marketer &  Narrow.io, tools to help marketers scale their content marketing & social media efforts. He is also an avid blogger and writes for Forbes, Inc, WSJ and Entrepreneur.

“1. I always start by formulating a hypothesis around the weaknesses of the site. I validate the hypothesis by surveying visitors using tools like Qualaroo and talking to potential and existing customers. This process usually gives me 5-10 different tests to run, typically around messaging and copy.
2. I prioritize the test based on impact or urgency and start a/b testing. I typically start with top of the funnel a/b test and move down the funnel but its different for every company and depends on where their biggest weakness are.”

Angie also uses a framework to determine what to test and to prioritize:

Angie Schottmuller

Helping organizations exceed goals and better understand customers using data-driven technology and persuasive marketing psychology.

“To decide what to test I map out and inventory issues and ideas we have for optimization, then I score them using the PIER framework. The PIE comes from the WiderFunnel model:

1. Potential – How much improvement can be made on the pages?

2. Importance – How valuable is the traffic to the pages?

3. Ease – How complicated will the test be to implement on the page or template?

4. Reusability – I added the “R” to score reusability of the insight learned

Once I’ve mapped out the highest scoring testing plan, the next step for me is getting the team aligned on what to test. You can work extremely hard on your end but you have to have your team members on the same page or you’ll be wasting a lot of time and energy.

1. Draft a test plan

2. Perform discovery for controlling the test environment — PPC ad management constraints, outside variables, potential pollutants, etc.

3. Regroup as a larger team to commit to the plan.

4. Execute”

Before looking at the numbers and finding the leak, Nichole first puts her customer to work on answering some tough questions and dedicates most of her time to defining the language a company should be using:

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

is a SaaS Consultant & Customer Success Evangelist. Chief Strategy Officer at @Inturact. Moderator at @ProductHunt & @GrowthHackers. Co-Founder at @GetTheCraft & @SaaSCommunity. Previously: Growth at @Inboundorg. INFJ.

״Before starting out, I have the website owner fill out the Ideal Customer Profile Framework and the Value Proposition Canvas, then I look at the data. It’s a lot of work filling out both forms, however language is the most important aspect of converting/acquiring the right customers.

These frameworks and AB testing tips the CRO experts shared are simply our best practices and our tested methodologies . Now it’s up to you to take these processes and try them out for yourselves to figure out where to start testing on your site, and what to test in order to increase your conversions.

Which expert’s methodology best fits with your style? do you have a different way you go about finding what to test and where to start?

I recently got back from speaking at Optimizely’s event Opticon in San Francisco which had some really interesting and valuable content going on and some really cool speakers (not referring to myself!). One thing that kept coming up on all sessions and appeared to be on everyone’s agenda was how to get ideas for tests. It seems that many companies now have great techniques for prioritizing their tests and for launching them, but not many know what to actually test. Once you’ve done all the research and found the right pain point to attack, you need to start planning what you’re actually going to change in the funnel and how will you measure its success.

Running another call to action button test is pointless as you’ve probably realized by now the results aren’t that interesting and hard to analyze. So what should you test?

Below is a list of 4 meaningful ab test ideas you can run on your landing pages and actually learn from.

1. Test image strategies: As 60% of our brain is geared towards visual context, the first thing we see on a landing page is the visual and according to the picture superiority effect, images are better remembered than words. The visual you use on your landing page will have a major impact on your visitor’s decision to stay or leave. One interesting test to run is visual strategy – test an “end result” image versus a “this is the product image”. While the majority of business have an image of their product on the landing page, the end result image will demonstrate the emotion and status a customer will feel once they’ve purchased your solution.

For instance on the latest webinar I did with Unbounce I compared landing pages of dating sites, on one hand you have Zoosk, showing their product on their landing page:

On the other, you have this dating site showing you the end result of using their product – a happy couple on the beach (why we designed the page this way).

To run an image strategy test, start by asking yourself – what do people want to feel once they’ve purchased our solution? how do we make their life better? then, project that with your image.

2. Test an exit pop – Your personal feelings about them don’t matter – exit pops (done the right way) work.

A while ago we added a newsletter signup pop up to the Conversioner site.

It was actually doing well, but our marketing team came up with the idea to put my picture on one of the pop ups and a video of me inviting readers to join our community. Needless to say, I was completely against it. I was not interested in having my face all over the website. But once the AB test card was pulled, I couldn’t continue arguing… To my dismay, the pop up tripled our newsletter registrations and we were now getting almost three times as much signups a day. I still dislike that pop up, but it still works better than anything else. Proving once again, that opinions don’t matter and what matters are the results.

A clean, intuitive and simple pop up can work magic, go test it.

3. Test Headline Strategies – I’ve probably said this countless times before; customers do not care about your achievements or your success, we care about what’s in it for us. This is where you take a step back and consider the value your customer receives by purchasing your solution. Most companies highlight their features: the characteristic of your solution that remain the same whether your customer buys it or not. Rather than the value, which is the outcome perceived and defined by your customer that will make a change in their life if they purchase your product or not.

To highlight the value focus on the emotional gain for the customer- a better version of themselves. Essentially this means highlighting how your customer’s life will change by purchasing your solution. Test one variation that highlights that value.

Hike’s strategy is highlighting their size and capacity. Focusing on themselves as the largest chat application. To optimize this, they could explain why they’re the largest – showing the value customers see in using their app.

And here are a couple of landing pages that highlight your value as a customer:

Do promises better more productive meetings that will make you smile.

Wunderlist highlights the change you’ll see in your life.

Consider testing these different strategies- about the product vs. the outcome for your customer.

4. Test dedicated mobile landing pages – Mobile isn’t the next big thing, it already is. As you know, responsive design is better than having to pinch & zoom, but it takes a lot more than that to convert people on mobile. Test a dedicated mobile landing page and make sure you treat your mobile visitors properly:

• Short messages
• Large call to action button
• Utilize mobile capabilities like the “click to call” button and navigation or location based offers.

Mobile visitors have different expectations (60% of web users expect a site to load on their mobile phone in 3 secs or less), don’t let them down because they won’t return.

Let’s see what Wrike’s responsive design looks like (the desktop version):

 The mobile responsive version (compressing all desktop data to a mobile screen):

On the over hand this company has a desktop version for their landing page and a different mobile version for it:

Do you have any recommendations for quick meaningful test people could run?

 

Use our conversion optimization guide for beginners to improve and improve and improve your website’s performance and push your limits even further.

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” said the great Winston Churchill. But simply changing is not enough. When optimizing websites you need to know you’re changing in the right direction. You want to be using a data-driven growth strategy instead of just guessing. The following article is meant to provide you with an actionable conversion optimization guide, including the absolute must-dos in any conversion rate optimization process, to help you in achieving your initial CRO goals yourself.

A Full On Paradigm Shift

The user experience you provide your users acts as your website’s business model. You wouldn’t start a business or make changes to your business model based on intuition alone, and it’s time you take this approach and apply it to your online assets. This is conversion rate optimization, a long term, ongoing strategic process of optimizing every aspect of your website, not just to better suite your users’ needs, but with the specific aim of improving your business’ performance.

This process is one that requires investing both time and money. If you’re hesitant, you can start small and expand once you start seeing results. If you’re just starting out, and you follow our lead, you’ll see how beneficial this practice can be. While there are “no silver bullets,” our years of collective experience at Conversioner have lead us to come up with these simple steps, to get your DIY CRO project not only up and running, but showing results.

Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik writes about the lean analytics cycle: Metrics>Hypothesis>Experiment>Act as seen in the figure below. We’ll break it down for you and incorporate actionable and informative tips and resources.

Track, Set Goals & Start your Analysis

Before you can even think about running a/b tests, you need to make sure that you know what you’re looking at. This means, properly setting up your Google Analytics account, defining your goals and searching for potential leaks in your funnel. To some, finding the problem can be every bit as challenging as finding the right solution.

If you think that this is just a preliminary step that you can skip with no harm done, think again. Any resource you put into better understanding your Analytics in early stages will come back to you ten fold in later steps.

After you’ve chosen your Key Performance Indicators and defined your Google Analytics goals, it’s time to start putting them to good use and find some leaks. Depending on how much traffic your website gets you’ll need to give it some time to accumulate data from your new goals. Once a few days have gone by, checkout these four critical reports, your top sources for leaks:

1. Landing pages/Exit pages – This report let’s you see how your different pages perform. find the ones that are underperforming and start asking yourself, WHY? (we’ll get to that later)

2. Devices – In addition to looking at per page performance, you need to also look for cross website performance for different audiences. Don’t be surprised to see that your mobile conversion rates are lower than the desktop’s, but see if there are any specific devices underperforming. If you find that on iPhone 5 your conversion rates are way lower, be sure to check for specific functionality or design bugs that are hurting your conversion rates.

3. Browsers – Here you can see how your website is performing on different browsers and browser versions. For more checkout Douglas’s #1 insight on his post on how sports tactics can increase conversion rate.

4. Traffic Sources – Different audiences react differently to your content. Use this report to see how users from Facebook convert differently from users from organic or paid search. In later steps you can optimize your content according to this report and fit it to your users’ needs.

Dig Deeper

Now that you have a basic understanding of how users interact with you website, it’s time you find the right place to start your optimization before coming up with a plan for the changes that you think can improve your conversion rates.

For the first part, we recommend starting with a page that is as high up in your funnel as possible – a landing page – where you can make an impact on your entire funnel. Whether it’s your homepage or a dedicated landing page for a specific traffic source, you need to make sure that this page gets sufficient traffic. Running a/b tests with less than a hundred sessions a day can be both excruciating and ineffective. Check out Talia’s elaborate posts on Getting started with landing page optimization and The 5 key elements for landing page optimization.

Before you jump to conclusion about your pages, and this is crucial to the whole process, it’s important that you base your decisions on data and not on intuition. To do that you’ll need to go a little deeper in your analysis, utilizing the capabilities of User behavior analysis tools. This will allow you to come up with hypotheses or at the very least back up your intuition with data before taking tests live.

Hypothesize

This is the fun part. Based on the two previous steps you can now come up with the brilliant ideas that will literally make you more money. Most optimizers just play around with elements on their page, changing the color of the call to action button or the copy of the title, and that’s ok. But if you really want to see your conversion rates climb, you need to start using emotional triggers, testing holistic and strategic hypothesis and not just elements. Tapping into the psychological process your users undergo are your real key to success.

For additional inspiration checkout our recent landing page critiques that incorporate suggestions for tests that are varied in type and scope:

• 10 Landing Pages Examples to Increase Sales

• 15 landing pages examples and what you can learn from them

Pick a tool, setup and start testing your hypothesis

Think you know what you need to do to increase your conversion rate? Great! It’s testing time. Pick an a/b testing tool that has a “What You See Is What You Get” editor that will allow you to create a variation of you original page, changing just the elements you want to test. These tools have come a long way over the years and are very intuitive, pretty easy to use and offer great support and whole communities of users.

Make sure that you measure the effect of your changes across your entire funnel. Don’t settle for measuring CTR; remember the goal here, you want to see the effect on your revenue. After a day or two you can usually tell if you have something wrong in the setup but only after a minimum of two weeks you can start relying on the trend that you’re seeing, and only once you’ve reached statistical significance can you announce a winning variation.

*When you setup your first test, remember: forms and checkout processes have backend implications that require your tech team’s attention, so unless you’re doing this as part of an official project with allocated resources, we recommend sticking to landing pages.

Repeat and Expand

Running a successful a/b test does not mean having a successful conversion optimization process. For that you need to really commit yourself to learning, analyzing and optimizing your website by running test cycles on different part of you funnel. Furthermore, for us at Conversioner the steps listed above are a first measure, aimed at generating knowledge and insights before diving into a much deeper analysis of site-specific audiences and emotional triggers. We don’t believe in just testing elements on pages; we test strategies and in return we see much greater increases in conversion rates.

Have a Question?

A few weeks ago we finished running our first rounds of conversion optimization tests for one of Asia’s dating sites.

One of the most important and unique things about emotional conversion optimization is the possibility of increasing revenue right from the first step of your funnel before starting to optimize the checkout process. In less than 3 weeks the tested strategies increased signups by 38% and more importantly increased the number of paying users by 304%.

In this conversion optimization case study I will explain what we did, why we did it and what was the conversion optimization strategy. I will also discuss the methodology of the test and of course, the results and the winner of the test.

Test subject: A dating service website. The service itself is offered for free while you’re also asked to upgrade for further matchmaking services and help.

Test goal: Our main target was to increase sign ups (thus getting more leads) and more importantly getting more people to complete the online purchase funnel instead of completing it on the phone with a sales representative.

 

The Research:

As we do at the start of every emotional targeting research, we start by going through the funnel, locating leaks and recognizing frictions.

It’s extremely common to find many issues with Google Analytics account. The najority of companies are usually not tracking information well or don’t have the right goals set up. We  found 2 technical issues on Google Analytics that needed to be addressed:

Issue #1: First, the goal for sign up completion was set with a destination URL. All users, including already signed in users enter this URL, therefore we had no way of knowing who converted from the new landing pages, and who was already an existing user.

Issue #2: The second issue we found related to the paying subscribers. Again, the goal for payment for each of the pricing packages was defined as a destination URL. However all paying users were sent to the same URL, giving us no way of telling which user purchased which package.

The solution: For both technical issues the solution was the same – We added a parameter in the URL that distinguished between new customers and existing users.

Following the technical part of our research we started inspecting the target audience, and we  found major differences in the motives, reasons and behavior of different people within the platform. As usual, different people use the service in different ways and need different emotional triggers. The result of the research was building 2 different emotional strategies that covered: Trust and variety.

Strategy & Emotional Targeting:

The original landing page:

On this landing page you can see a great use of image pointing towards the call to action. In addition, the usage of testimonials and known icons are a great way to increase conversion.

 

Variation 1

The first strategy we designed was trust. We chose a romantic picture of a couple on a sunny day in the beach and created messaging designed to be more personal. We wanted to present the service and brand as unique, experienced and reliable – giving people the understanding that they will find their match in this place.

Variation 2

The second strategy revolved around creating a design that demonstrates the great variety of people they can meet if they use this service. The importance of this strategy was to show the simplicity of the service following the high success and satisfaction rate.

So, what do you think? Which of the variations won? We’ll get to that soon.

First, here are the main elements we changed in the landing pages:

• Design and colors: The images we used all have very pronounce eye contact. Showing the happiness of a young couple in love on one hand, and showing the variety of attractive people on the other hand makes the service become more real and vivid. Both landing pages keep soft and hopeful colors which are associated with feelings of love such as pink, white and soft blue.

• Messaging: The entire messaging on the pages  focused on finding the match of your life. Further more we wanted to show that the dream of finding your soul-mate can come true and is closer than ever. By using specific messaging for these young men & women we were able to trigger a hopeful reality for them which brought them closer towards their dream of finding a partner.

• Call to action: For both our variations we changed the titles and subtitles in order to add a call to action to them, making the call to action more visible and converting.

• User interface: This part includes many small and different changes. We added an explanatory video of the service, to show users what the service is about. Other technical changes were made such as replacing some of the fields of the form, minimizing escape routes out of the site and making the texts more readable by adding icons to each text bullet and shortening the texts.

 

The Results:

Variation 2 won the test. As mentioned earlier, signups were increased by 38% and the number of paying users was increased by 304%. Different emotional targeting triggers were applied along with technical changes that made all the difference. Our current test includes a mobile conversion optimization process and optimization to the desktop funnel. We’ll keep you posted.