The HiPPO factor

Just learnt a great new acronym today 'HiPPO' - Highest Paid Person's Opinion.
Never been more apt than when you're doing an optimization exercise on your website
and the 'HiPPO' blows your proposed new design out of the water because they dont like it based upon purely subjective thinking.

Found this on Dave Chaffney's site in an interview with Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics - An Hour A Day.

The reptilian brain & your inner buy button

When we do AB testing or multivariate testing you are generally experimenting with a persons unconscious response to your test content. Basically does a red apply button work better than an orange one for instance. Marketing experts refer to this as connecting to or appealing to the primitive or 'reptilian brain'. When someone arrives on a landing page and is making a quick intuitive based decision you are generally dealing with the inner, more reactive brain, not the higher conscious brain. Your not asking for any in-depth analysis of your page content you just measure what works best for getting a person to perform a desired action in your test. It seems for the majority of the time the reptilian brain is at the driving wheel so we need to talk directly to the driver.





This is considered to be neuromarketing in it's most basic form. The study of how we respond to adverts and products at a neurological level. In research in this area volunteers have their brain activity monitored via brain scanners whilst being exposed to marketing media to measure their response. The ability to understand how the inner workings of the brain processes images and messages and reaches decisions potentially gives marketers a new tool to fine-tune ads and marketing campaigns, bolster and extend brands and design better products. Marketers’ use of neuroscience technologies has alarmed some consumer groups who fear that it could lead to the discovery of an 'inner buy button', which, when pressed, would turn us into automated shoppers. Such fears spring from the increase in marketing-related problems such as pathological gambling, obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

The power of the testimonial

Been running a multivariate test on a current account product page again. This test has been running for over 3 weeks and not performing too well it could be said. Below is the readout from our Maxymiser console for this test.



So we sat down and thought how we might turn this under-performance around. I had been hoping to try and use a customer testimonial in a test for a while so I suggested that this might be the time & place to do just that. On the product page we had a test element that displays a strapline immediatly under the product title. So we took the worst performing variant and changed it to read a short & snappy customer testimonial instead (see before & after below).



Now we re-commenced the test. We didn't go for a complete restart, we just take the test results from the new start date of when we added the testimonial variant into the mix. And a few days in and the difference is incredible, the top performing page combination by a wide margin contains our new testimonial, this is identified as V_013F on the report below. So just goes to show, the test is still running at time of writing but we'll see if this performance degrades over time and whether this new test variant ends up in the winning page combo. At the moment though a 26% uplift in conversion shouldn't be sniffed at, and it's another thing we can tick-off as being tested.

UPDATE: 24th March 2009


I thought I'd better update this post today to take account of what's happened to this test. So the test has been running now for 63 days. Below is a screenshot of the report console for today. As you can see the V_013F variant (which is the testimonial variant) is placed in the top 3 winning page combinations. On the embedded graph I've pinpointed where we introduced this customer testimonial variant into the test. It seems that after a brief lift the test settles back down into a level pattern acheiving a roundabout 11.5% uplift in conversion, no longer retaining the 26% uplift first attained. The Maxymiser 'Chance to beat' metric also hovers around the 46% level for the best page combination (P10) so the test seems in a state of flux and not really progressing towards statistical significance. I should also point out that we've culled a few negatively performing variants from the test.

Seasonal shift

The established wisdom of web page optimization suggests that images, and particularly images of people help build a connection between the visitor and your content/product/brand, See earlier post about quick wins regarding this.

We have been testing this theory through ongoing multivariate (multivariable) testing on several product pages on the site. However we've inadvertently created a rod for our own backs.

The original test was started back in November and we gave it an autumnal theme. The test variant with these images originally performed well but a gradual errosion in performance occured as the test and time wore on. The test was still running as we entered the Christmas period and suddenly the autumn theme looked out of place so the drop in visitor appeal was understandable. To confirm this we revisited the variant and replaced the autumn images with winter based ones. Again an uplift in performance was immediatly acheived. The test is still running and currently producing a respectable 8.95% uplift in conversion; but it's still wintery outside with the occasional snow flurries to reinforce that, so maybe this explains the appeal. Now as time moves on it will be interesting to see if this begins to errode in performance too.

So we have a situation where we know a particular content works but it will require constant maintenance to keep on top of the shifting seasonal themes. We'll need to come up with a sustainable image or theme that will work as well despite the time of year. We still have an MVT test on the roadmap for March/April that plays on the Spring theme but hopefully this test will be it's last incarnation. All of the past and proposed images are below, we've nicknamed this variant 'Shallow Grave' due to the half-buried nature of the models in shot.
AUTUMN > WINTER > SPRING.....

Emphasis of key words

A recent finding of our optimisation testing on our product pages is that if you embolden key words that emphasize a positive aspect or feature of your product you can more or less guarantee an uplift in conversion. The image below is taken from a recent winning test variant of a multivariate test we conducted on one of our savings product pages.





This winning page design resulted in a 4.32% improvement in conversion of visitors clicking on the ‘Apply Now’ button and more importantly it resulted in an 8.21% improvement in the conversion of visitors submitting the product application form. We're now rolling this keyword emphasis out across our other product pages.