Every website out there today has a conversion goal, yours may be trying to encourage your users to sign up to your newsletter or buy your product or even just read your blog posts. As you can imagine, many companies spend a vast amount of time coming up with ways to improve their conversions through tweaking their website. In the industry this is termed Conversion Rate Optimazation (CRO).

Using split testing on your website as a tool for CRO can help you to easily work out what helps to increase your conversions. The great thing about this is that, unlike many online marketing techniques you don’t need to spend loads of money, it simply requires that you be creative and put yourself in your target audiences shoes.

There is no golden rule which will lead to instant traffic however within this article I will suggest some observed techniques that seem to adhere to a few general patterns and yield good results.

Just Host

One of our clients operate in the highly competitive Web Hosting industry. It requires a vast marketing budget to stand any chance of competing with the big guys. However, through the use of split testing to help improve their conversions they were able to make the most of every hit that they received on the site. This is where you can gain the upper hand as there is no point in having a bunch of traffic coming to your site if you can’t turn it into conversions.

Below is an example of their original website which converted well but we decided to try a little split testing to see if we could improve even further.

We experimented by adding in the original price before discount as well as an Unlimited Web Space banner and found that conversions increased by 6.5%. This is a huge increase for such minor changes.

National Rail Enquiries

Another great example of how split testing can help conversions is to use it as a tool for developing a new website. National Rail Enquiries spent time trialing different technique on their old site before they launched the new one. They discovered that by simplifying the Journey Planner feature to include the most basic fields required to find a train journey, conversions increased by more than double. Customers don’t want to be bothered with filling out every little detail to get to their end goal, if they do then they can use an advanced search feature.

With the new site it is clear what the primary focus is and this is due to them split testing the old site to discover the the main reason people come to their site. It wasn’t to find out about departures and arrivals or destinations it was to simply find a train ticket for an A to B journey.

They are still split testing their website since the new launch, this is because what works for one website doesn’t always work for another, so a little fine tuning will always help.

iStock Photo

iStock Photo have just launched their new website and it is very interesting to see how much they have simplified it. The majority of the content is found when users scroll down the page, this is because it is secondary information. The main point of conversion on the site is for users to search for their required image. The new website situates the search field in a central location at the top of the page which is in an simple, easy to find location.

One of the main things to achieve in increasing your conversions is not making your customer think about what you are offering. By making everything obvious and simple you can easily guide your visitor to your conversion goal.

However, like I said earlier in the article every website is unique therefore coming up with your own unique CRO techniques tailored to your unique audience and unique goal will give you the best results. Just keep on testing and experimenting because conversion rates are king.