50% of “Website Improvements” Fail to Improve Conversion Rates
March 23rd, 2011 → 7:00 am @ Robert Kingston
Ideas are powerful - you don’t need to watch Inception to know that, either. Results released by Microsoft, Amazon and App Sumo indicate most of their ideas to improve their websites have failed to improve the metrics they were designed to lift. Here are the results: Amazon - 50% of experiments fail to show improvement Microsoft [...]
Measuring Lift Over the Course of a CRO Campaign
February 3rd, 2011 → 7:00 am @ Robert Kingston
Conversion rates can change day to day without any definite explanation - and someone in your organisation, comparing time periods might ask you – “Why isn’t our conversion rate X% higher as you said it would be?” Or worse yet - “Why haven’t we seen any lift in our Google Analytics conversion rate?” I’m going [...]
Why CRO Gives More/Less Than You Bargained For
January 12th, 2011 → 4:00 am @ Robert Kingston
While there’s some consensus that conversion rates should be measured by unique visitors, in some industries it can be naive to ignore a conversion rate calculated based on visits - especially under (very rare) specific circumstances. Tools like Google Website Optimizer rely solely on unique visitors, meanwhile Google Analytics relies upon visits to calculate conversion rates. Let’s see [...]
Conversion Optimisation for ‘Noobs’: Choosing What to Test
November 16th, 2010 → 4:00 am @ Robert Kingston
I see a lot of people who start off in conversion optimisation making several critical mistakes when choosing what to test. Here are a few that I see frequently: Testing content or elements that are meaningless to customers Making small changes and expecting the world Running a test in a low trafficked part of the [...]
Why Optimising for Conversion Rate may not Increase Your Revenue
October 1st, 2010 → 8:24 am @ Robert Kingston
So, you’ve run a couple of tests and noticed a 30% increase in your conversion rate. Where’s that 30% extra revenue per month? Google Website Optimizer tells you that the test won with 98% “confidence” that it won. Come on! Believe it or not, there can be a number of things at play here. Let’s [...]
3 Ways to Track Google Website Optimizer A/B Tests in Analytics
August 10th, 2010 → 7:00 am @ Robert Kingston
Displaying experiment data in Google Analytics from Google Website Optimizer is extremely straightforward to do. You might have found my other post on integrating Google Website Optimizer MVT with Google Analytics and were curious as to how you could integrate it with Google Analytics. The truth is though, this may not be what you anticipated. [...]
When Testing is a Waste of Time and Resources
July 31st, 2010 → 7:00 pm @ Robert Kingston
A lot of websites advocate that you MUST TEST EVERYTHING. While this makes a lot of sense, it shouldn’t be followed blindly in all cases. Like many rules such as this, you get the best results when you know when to break them. Here’s why… Your changes can’t be measured accurately If you’re unable to [...]
Spy On Your Competitors’ Multivariate and A/B Split Tests
May 31st, 2010 → 7:00 am @ Robert Kingston
With a simple browser plugin, you can find out if your competitors are using Google Website Optimizer. But what it can’t do, is show you what they’re testing. Here, I’m going to show you how you can see exactly what your competitors are testing on their sites. Sneaky? A little. Smart? Totally. What you need [...]
Question: What Does Conversion Optimisation Mean?
May 4th, 2010 → 6:53 am @ Robert Kingston
Since conversion optimisation is a relatively under-developed field on the web (at least in Australia), I’m doing a little bit of research to try and find out what people generally think conversion optimisation is about. This should help me understand what level of posts I should be publishing. Share Your Answers Anyway, please copy and [...]
Setup Free Behavioural Targeting on Your Site
April 20th, 2010 → 11:30 pm @ Robert Kingston
All the big guys do behavioural targeting - so why don’t you? Too expensive? Too difficult? Pffft… Did you know you can set this up for free? Introducing BT Buckets BT Buckets is a new service that allows you to dynamically serve content to visitors based on their previous behaviours on your site. Here’s how [...]
