Guest Author: Billy Shih, Webtrends
A lot of marketers want to get into testing and optimization, yet it can be intimidating to start. While I don’t think optimization can be learned overnight, it’s not any more challenging than what marketers do already and reinforces many of the skills they already have.
In fact, the better you are at analytics, copywriting or any other useful marketing skill, the better you will do in testing. Right now, I am taking advantage of the analytics prowess of Webtrends to boost the findings from our test results in The Open Campaign. More ways to measure KPI’s means more ways for me to understand my audience. Similarly, if you were good at copywriting, you could write copy for multiple personas and try them all in testing.
With these things in mind, let’s walk through how optimization is done and look at the overlaps it has with what online marketers already do.
Step 1: Evaluate the website for weaknesses – Choosing a page to test
When reviewing your analytics data, one thing you probably already do is look for areas of your site that are underperforming. This also happens to be one of the best ways to choose a page to test.
Look for a page:
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That used to perform well, but doesn’t anymore
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That is underperforming compared to similar pages
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With distinct segments converting differently
Step 2: Redesign a page – Deciding what to test
Anytime you’re looking to do a page redesign or even just make modifications to it, you have to have some reasons behind it. Now that you have a page selected, the first thing to do is to figure out why that page would underperform. You’re not looking for 100% proven facts, you’re just trying to hypothesize why the page isn’t as good as it should be.
Here are some standard questions:
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Looking at the traffic sources, does the page match up with the mindset of visitors coming from those sources?
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How can you improve continuity between pages (e.g. using a PPC headline for the page headline)?
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What is missing from the page? Is there too much information?
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How well is it organized? Is it organized in a way the audience can digest?
The most common problem I find is that pages are too complicated and need to be refocused on the core goal of the page.
Once you have a few ideas, bring them to your creative team or ask them to contribute some ideas. You should be able to use the same workflow as you do currently. Sometimes I work really closely with creative teams to brainstorm, other times I just tell them exactly what I want. I recommend getting creative input though, as they bring a healthy new perspective and can see some design challenges we marketers may miss.
The only difference compared to the standard design process is that the creative team makes a few comps of different ideas and you don’t have to choose just one—instead, you test them. Similarly, your web development team does basically the same thing, turning the comps into code and then inserting the variations into your optimization platform.
Step 3: Analyze performance – Reviewing the test data
Once the test is up and running, start monitoring your data. Like any new page, it’ll take some time to gather enough data in order to be able to take away some solid information. With a test, it’ll take longer than analyzing a single page’s performance because you are testing many variations.
Traditionally, once a page is redesigned and pushed out live, you would compare how the page performed in a week or month against how the old page performed the week or month before (or the year earlier.) This isn’t very accurate though since outside factors you can’t control may cause changes in its performance, such as seasonality or other marketing campaigns.
With testing, this is avoided and you can compare how your original page performed against the new variations during the same week or month. This makes things easier to understand and a more accurate comparison.
Once you see that the winning variations hold true for a few days, the test can typically be called complete and you should have a shiny, new optimized page. Instead of having a single person or group in your company decide what the best page is, your customers have done it for you!
Optimization doesn’t have to be complicated and lines up closely to what online marketers all over the world are doing every day. Although there is some extra work involved, knowing what your customers want is the most difficult task of all and with optimization you get a powerful tool to resolve that problem.
