Quick wins for web optimization

If I had to summarise the key points that I have heard again and again from experienced MVT testers, be it web based or published literature I would say the following seem to be touted regularly as quick win changes you can make on your site to gain conversion uplift. From personal experience some work and some just dont. As you will see we're yet to put them all into practice:

1. If you have a call to action - make it BIG.

We have an MVT test running currently that has around 8 different variants of apply buttons. Some are big and some are small in a variety of colours. Currently a large version of a newly designed button is beating the rest of the pack with a 18% uplift in conversion (It's orange by the way). Optimization experts generally recommend making your button big and red to draw as much attention to it as possible. We had one such variant and it performed so badly that we have culled it from the test. At least we've tested it though and put that theory to bed.

2. Have more than one call to action on page.

This should be a no brainer really, but when your running a test you need to be able to track people clicking on such buttons during the course of the test. If you have multiple buttons this can be tricky and from my own experience there are limitations as to how many 'actions' you'll want to feasibly track during the testing period.

3. Have a testimonial of your product on the page.

We havn't been able to test the use of this one yet in an MVT situation yet but we have tests scheduled that will exhaustively test this theory in the future. We have however A/B tested the use of testimonials within the customer journey and there was no real uplift to speak of.

4. Use photos of people in your page.

We've had an unofficial embargo on images on our site until recently due to a perceived impact on SEO rankings. This embargo has lifted and we can now start to use images with avengence once more. We've got a Homepage MVT test scheduled which will pit images against text based variants and I'll let you know how that pans out.

5. Simplify your copy.

If you have loads of copy it's daunting, off-putting and boring. Find ways to either reduce your copy or orgainise it in such a way as to make it look less overwhelming. Try tabbed content, or use expand and collapse containers on a page. The key winning element of our first MVT test was to drastically reduce and simplify the copy on the page by moving some to a pop-up window. We've also actually been aided by recently having to comply with the Plain English campaign. Initially it's a headache getting your content to comply with their rules, but once you've done it it can make a world of difference to the way a message scans to the end user.

I'll personally try to continue working these concepts into each of the tests we
undertake as we move forward. Where they don't work I'll hopefully learn from that and carry that forward to the next test. The key thing is to evolve your experiments as you go, bearing in mind what works for one person may not work for the other. Such simple changes can however be useful if there's a tangible pressure to gain results and an uplift in sales.