How to improve your website conversion rate

Did you know that even the smallest website can use testing to find out which page layouts convert best? If you have an ecommerce site and want to find out if a change to a page improves or decreases sales then Google have made it really easy.

You’ve probably from time to time noticed changes on large sites like eBay which disappear if you refresh your cookies. Doubtless you’ll have seen announcements saying that they’re running tests for a proportion of users. They then measure the results of both pages to determine which works best before migrating everyone to the best performing page.

Google Analytics now gives you the ability to do this on your website with “Content Experiments”. You create two or more versions of the same page, tell Google what percentage of visitors will see each version and specify what a successful action will be (e.g. add to shopping cart).

Google will then display the different versions of the page to different visitors and will track the results. Over time they’ll build up a report to let you know which is the best converting page from which time you can then make this the default view.

Content experiments can quickly make a big difference to your conversion rates. Do you know whether “50% off” or “Half Price” would result in more sales? Google Content Experiments can tell you. Sometimes something as simple as the colour of the “Add to shopping cart” button can make a big difference and again this is something you can test to get the empirical answer.

Stop making changes to your website that you “think” will result in more sales. Start testing and then implementing changes that you “know” will perform.