In past posts we’ve spoken about the importance of waiting and receiving significant results. That’s why we built this tool, to help you interpret your A/B test results in a simple way. Analyzing the data at the right time and giving your test the right amount of time to run can be the difference between a complete flop of a test and a grand success.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Our A/B test significant calculator allows you to easily compare the results of two versions of your pages and determine which is working best. You can also add it to your favourites and use it in future tests.

If you have been optimizing your site for some time now you probably already know and feel the amount of effort it takes to run a meaningful test, with actual scalable results.

Running tests is one, but knowing what led to the improvement and how, is another. Even if your conversions have increased, how do you know what caused that increase? Is the increase genuine or is it caused by a random change? To know if your results are real, you need to make a comparison between the page with the original elements (i.e the control) and the new page (the variation). Which is why you need to do A/B testing, wait for the results, make sure they are significant, analyze them and optimize.

How to Use the significant Tool

Using the tool is easy. Simply enter the number of visits and conversions for each of the pages, and let the calculator work its charm.

The calculator will tell you everything you need to know about your A/B test:

• The conversion rate

• Which of the pages won the test

• By how much did that page beat the other

• Whether your results are significant

• The confidence level of the results.

 

How results can be misjudged

“One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions”

Admiral Grace Hopper.

 

Only if you use your A/B test correctly will you be able to make interpretations and draw conclusions from the results. However if your test results are not significant, it will be wrong to make any conclusions from the test. The significance of the test determines the likelihood of a result being a random occurrence. Statistical significance gives a proof beyond doubt that you’re A/B test results are not a chance occurrence. This is why any A/B test calculator should test for significance. Test results can be misjudged when for example you’re not running the test long enough, or when you haven’t calculated your sample size prior to the test. Read more about A/B mistakes you should avoid.

OK, so now you know how to use the A/B calculator and why significance is important. But how does the A/B test work exactly? To understand everything there is to know about A/B testing and significant results, read the following tips:

 

How A/B Testing works

Before planning your conversion test, start with a strategy. This strategy will help you decide which elements in your funnel need to be changed. Once you have your strategy well thought out you can begin creating your landing pages (or any other pages) and launch your test.

 

Why do A/B testing

As I’ve mentioned, A/B testing is a must if you want to be sure of the reasons that caused your conversion rate to change. A/B testing will tell you if the changes you’ve made actually have statistical significance or if they are a result of a random and inconsistent change.

 

Where should you test

There are many services and tools out there that allow you to set up an A/B test. Google Analytics, Optimizely and VWO to name a few. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and you should try them and decide what works for you. The platform you use should allow easy test implementation and easy analysis.

 

Who should do an A/B test

You should! Anyone can setup an A/B test. As long as you follow guidelines you should be OK. Should you test small changes or immediately go for the big ones? I would say, if it’s your first test and you’re doing it on your own, start with a small change like the color of your buttons (remember that in order to see big increase you need to make big changes but to start out you can go for something simple). If you’re more experienced in doing A/B testing, you can get tips on how to test big changes in the next paragraph.

 

What can be tested (and what can go wrong)

Everything on your site can be tested, from the color of your call to action button, to your headlines, images, funnel and shopping cart. If you decide to test big changes and concepts, make sure these changes are a part of the strategy you built. By testing big changes, you will be able to learn much more from each test and then scale down to the impact of the button or headline.

 

When to test

One of the basic principles in A/B testing is the Timing. Comparing 2 versions isn’t enough, you should test them at the same time. Otherwise you wouldn’t know whether the changed conversion rate was a result of the changes you’ve made or the different timing. For example, it wouldn’t be a fair test to test a version of a Christmas cards site a week before Christmas, and test the second version a week after.

Another thing about timing is giving the test enough time to run. Remember, optimization requires time, and so does statistical significance.

Launching an AB test? Don’t forget to check out our landing page checklist before you start.

Click here to get more tips for uploading a conversion optimization test.

In my previous landing page overview post I discussed Adobe’s landing page. In that post I established the importance of the landing pages and its elements. The landing page is one of the first steps in the funnel which users convert from, and has a huge impact on your ROI. Optimizing your landing page should be an ongoing process and continuous (Tips on landing page optimization).

In this post, I decided to focus on Shutterstock’s Landing Page. I’ve been seeing it around quite a bit and thought it would be interesting to analyze it.

From theory to real life – Shutterstock’s landing page

1. Headlines

A good headline is one that contains a call to action. After all you do want your visitors to take an action, so why not motivate them from the first words they see on the page?

We have also discussed the importance of describing the benefits of your product on your landing page, not the features. – What’s in it for me? Check out the headline in bigstock. They’re headline is “Images for everyone” – making it accessible, real & easy. These benefits makes the headline more convincing and interesting.

Shutterstock’s headline is “Access 30 million images”. The focus in this headline is on the feature (variety) and not on the benefit to the visitor (be unique, or you don’t need to look anywhere else). It does contain a call to action which is very important, however it lacks any emotional message, therefore not fulfilling its potential for creating an impact. On the other hand this headline is following the number 1 rule for headlines: Short and to the point.

2. Call To Action

The call to action is one of the most important elements on your landing page. Shutterstock’s call to action is a red “Start Downloading Now” button. To be sure,  your call to action must always be above the fold. Placing it under the fold can be a conversion killer. If you want your visitors to hit the button, it has to appear in a place on the page that doesn’t require scrolling. A better option for Shutterstock would be to place a large button below the headline, and place the rest of the text below the button.

A very strong and useful call to action for Shutterstock could be “Download Images Now”. Not sure why Shutterstock chose to say “Start Downloading Images Now”, but it’s always a good idea to A/B test your call to action buttons and use less words. Read more about A/B test here.

* The fold is marked in – - -

What about the choice of red for your call to action button? I’ll get to that later.

Learn how to improve your Call To Action buttons.

3. Trust

Shutterstock’s landing page doesn’t have any trust icons. Trust icons come in handy a lot, especially when you present prices to your visitors. Visitors need to know it’s safe to make a purchase on your website and trust icons help achieve that. Your visitors shouldn’t have to think twice about the security and credibility of your site. The only trust related elements are the links to the “website and licensing terms” above the call the action. There you can see one trust icon which I would recommend placing in the landing page. On the other hand Shutterstock is a very well known brand, and that is priceless when talking about trust.

This blog post gives good tips on how to increase trust on landing pages

4. Choice of colors

So, I’ve mentioned Shutterstock chose to use red for their call to action button. Red is associated with increased excitement, energy, passion, action and desire (emotional color guide).

Generally speaking, any color that is in contrast to the rest of the page is a good color for a call to action button. However in Shutterstock’s site even the red button, which is usually a strong color that stands out, manages to blend in and is not be prominent enough. It would probably make more sense to increase the size of the button and increase the color contrast.

This landing page should also feature an image. This can make the page more memorable. A mind blowing image is to be expected from a website which sells beautiful images.

For example take a look at this landing page by Depositphotos, Shutterstock’s  competitors.

The image is quite attention grabbing, and this makes all the difference.

 

5. Load time

There are many tools out there that test your site’s speed (a very helpful tool that gives tips and recommendations on how to improve your site speed).

On my browser Shutterstock’s load time is about 3.3 sec. Remember, you have about 2 seconds before your visitors become impatient. A longer load time may result in a skyrocketing bounce rate.

What else?

There are many other elements you can discuss about on this page, for example form optimization. Every field you remove from your form can increase your conversions. One way to do so is by progressive profiling – gathering your leads over time instead of all at once as Shutterstock tries to do on this page. You reduce the number of fields and use subsequent forms to gather the additional data you need. The advantage is a high conversion rate, with higher qualified leads because of their continuous interaction with the website.

Conclusion

Shutterstock is a well known stock photography website, entered by millions of visitors from around the world. For a high profiled site as this, I would consider taking the mentioned steps to optimize the landing page in order to increase conversions.

Having said that, remember that everything you change on your landing page should be tested. Every element you alter should have a clear conversion optimization strategy behind it, and this strategy should be well defined before you start your tests.

Learn more on optimization your landing page  here.

It’s your chance to determine who takes the next spotlight, which brands would you like us to analyze next?

In one of my recent posts I discussed the fact that 90% of our decision-making in life is irrational and that marketers could use this fact to benefit their marketing efforts. Why am I telling you all this again? Because Evan Spiegel (Snapchat’s CEO) just acted as a live case study to prove it.

23 years old Evan Spiegel, CEO of a revenue-less app turned down a $3 billion offer. Why you ask? Because Mark Zuckerberg didn’t treat him nicely. Because of EGO.

Triggered by the “Self-image” emotional trigger, Spiegel decided to give up on what may have been the deal of a lifetime.  Self-image is an emotional trigger that exists in most of us on all different levels. People who are motivated by “self-image” are people who think highly of themselves, do not appreciate being put down, will not settle for second place and care a lot about people’s perception of them, they want to be the winners or at least look like winners.

At conversioner we recognize these triggers and use them. After running our psycho-emotional research we profile our client’s users and find the right emotional triggers that will motivate their users. For example, a self-image person, like Spiegel, may need to be dared.

In one of our most successful tests we used the sentence: “Real winners play for real” – meaning: You’re only a winner if you’re playing for real cash.  It’s all about the messaging and the design. Trigger your users, light up a fire you know exists in them and wait.

For years now offline advertising is based on exactly that; don’t show the product, make them feel it. Think about all those perfume ads on TV, when was the last time you understood one of them?

People buy a product or service for what it makes them feel. Not its features, services or cost, they might say they do but they don’t. People will spend a lot of money to feel good.

And, people will give up on a lot of money ($3 billion to be exact) to feel good too.

Use it or it will use YOU.

Choosing the right place to start your optimization process is a super important decision. With so many conversion strategies and methods out there it’s hard to know where to start and how.

Where to start: It is customary to divide the user flow into Upper funnel (i.e banners, landing pages, lead generation) and lower funnel (registration forms and pricing pages etc.).  When choosing the starting point of your test you need to take into account that the “lower” the point is in the funnel the less traffic you’ll have for the test.

To help you get started and locate where you need to start optimizing, we’ve listed 3 basic metrics you should be following as soon as possible. These metrics will help you decide where to start optimizing and how.

 

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric measures the amount of users who visit your site’s first page, and stop there. For example: if you have 10,000 visits a month to your site and 5000 users leave before doing anything else on your site, your bounce rate is 50%. If your visitors are leaving without taking any actions you may need to work on:

1. Call to action buttons – One of the most important parts of conversion is creating the right call to action buttons. You can find 3 tips to improve your call to action buttons here.
2. Messaging – Check your messaging. Using emotional conversion optimization can vastly improve your conversion optimization and get visitors to take the next step in your site. Check out these 3 emotional triggers to optimize your messaging.

From the screen capture below you can see our clients bounce rate throughout the course of a month. Once standing on over 60% bounce rate, has now changed to less than 10% by simply locating the leaks and addressing them.

One important thing to remember is that bounce rate is a natural part of a website and some people just don’t find what they’re looking for or have found what they were looking for and don’t need to continue on, so you won’t be able to minimize it to 0% but you can reduce it a lot and learn from it.  In many online campaigns even 95% bounce rate is good for certain media channels so it’s always good to compare this data versus any other traffic sources performance for a base line.

• Note that there is a difference between exit rate and bounce rate as Google explains here.

 

Funnel Visualization

Google analytics offers an option to follow your funnel and find the “leak”. Once you’ve set your goals on Google analytics the “Funnel visualization” option will be available. Following it will give you a lot of insight on the amount of visitors who have entered each part of the funnel, the amount of visitors who converted and their flow.

This is a wonderful tool to illustrate where is the most significant “leak” in your funnel, assisting you to take the right action in order to optimize it ( learn to avoid shopping cart abandonment).

For example, as you can see below, 50,516 visitors entered our client’s homepage, 52.56% clicked on the button to proceed. On the side you can see where users went to if they didn’t convert, like the pricing for example. This flow will help you understand where you need to optimize or where you can add conversion metrics.

Below we can see that many visitors end up on the pricing page instead of signing up, so we could add a call to action on the pricing page and increase conversion from there.

 

Technology

One metric you do not want to miss out on is the technology your visitors are using. On Google Analytics you will find (in the Audience category) the option to see which browsers your visitors are using, their version and whether they’re using mobile, desktop or tablets. Once you have this information you can:

• QA – Does your site work on all Chrome versions? Are you compatible to Safari? Run a string of tests on all browsers and make the corrections, do not lose customers because of bugs.

• True Story: In one of our recent tests we discovered that our client’s landing pages weren’t compatible with older versions of IE, which resulted in almost 0% conversion rate. This simple fix boosted their conversion rate by over 50%. Below you can see the difference from before we started optimizing and after, with over 250,000 visits via IE this was a massive optimization:

 

• Optimize: A new study shows that you could lose 40% of your visitors if your site isn’t mobile compatible. Is your site/product mobile responsive? Prepare yourself for your mobile traffic and do not lose it. A simple redirect to a mobile friendly page could save your conversion rate. Know your limitations and address them.
  • Tip: To know which pages you need to optimize for mobile add a secondary dimension in Google Analytics (while in mobile overview) – “landing page”, and see where those mobile visitors are going, that way you won’t need to optimise your entire site to mobile immediately but fix it on the go.

Conversion optimization is an ongoing process that requires many conclusive tests and iterations. Testing too many variables at a time can cause a mess and testing the wrong variable can waste our time. Be sure to work out a test plan before starting out and use Google analytics to tackle the right areas.

What are the metrics you watch to help you decide where to optimize?

 

P.S. We would really appreciate it if you share this post and let us know what you think!

Statistics on registration forms are pretty grim: 86% (!) of users leave a page instantly when they’re required to fill out a form.
Thanks to hundreds of lead generation/signups tests we’ve done in the past 4 years, we’ve come up with various tips and tricks that can help reduce abandonment rate significantly and improve the quality of leads dramatically.

How to create converting registration forms:

1. Auto fill –  Don’t waste your user’s time and energy. Use auto complete to detect the their full name, address and email address. The less you ask of a user the more inclined they will be to fill in the form.
2. Minimize your requests – Remove all the unnecessary fields, they can complete them later on. Ask only for the most basic information and create a quicker process for the user. Give the user the feeling that your form is a 30 second fill out and no more.
   Facebook’s signup process: To make things simpler, facebook could create one field for first & last name and make it look shorter. They could also have just one field for the email address and only after the user clicks “Sign up” show a message that says: “we’re sending you an email, make sure your the address is correct.”Groupon does it in an great way, asking one short question at a time and slowly navigating the user towards the end.

   

3. Help the user – Add small question marks next to your fields including explanations of each field. You’d be surprised to learn the kind of questions that prevent users from filling out a form, things that might seems obvious to you, but aren’t clear to others.
4. Messaging – Be specific, use a title that explains exactly why the user needs to sign up, for example: Signup to get a free e-book!
5. Call to action – Don’t forget to end your form with a clear call to action that indicates the end of the form and the continuation of the next steps.
6. “Show password” – Instead of asking your user to fill in their new password twice for validation, give them the option to “show password” and go over it by themselves. This will reduce the amount of fields and will give a sense of an easy and quick form.By giving users the option to “show” the password, mailchimp reduces the sign up fields to the minimum required and still allows users to verify their email.

7. Social sign up – Make it quick and easy, allow users to sign up or log in via their Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin account.
8. Mobile forms: One of the most important parts of filling out a form on mobile is to be able to see what you are actually doing, Don’t forget to zoom in on each field the user is updating. Another tip is to enable only the relevant keyboards in each field – i.e in the phone field to create the numbers as the default keyboard.
9. Mobility- some users like to use their mobile horizontally and some vertically, don’t forget to make your mobile forms accessible on both screen options and allow for easy usage.
10. Shipping and billing – Allow users to simply auto-fill their payment address from the shipping address instead of filling in their details twice.                 
11. Make required/optional fields clear to the user – If some info isn’t required, we advise you remove it completely. If you still want to keep it in the form make sure it is clear to users what’s mandatory and what’s not.
12. Clear errors – Errors a very important aspect of filling out forms. Locating the errors on the bottom or hidden will make it difficult for a user to understand why they can’t submit the form.

Filling out a form should be a simple step along the funnel. Make sure to test your registration forms as much as possible and of course, learn from your insights. If you want to get some more information, contact us here.