Designing web pages that actually convert is vital to your ecommerce venture. Throughout many conversations with conversion optimization experts, the one principle that emerges is companies interested in ensuring an optimized online shopping experience must test different versions of their landing pages and choose the best converting version as the winner.
But what kind of tests should an Internet marketer run? Generally speaking, there are two ways of testing the efficacy of your site: A/B tests and multivariate tests.
For example, let’s say you wanted to test the effectiveness of the “Buy Button” in your online shopping cart. For an A/B test, you would design two web pages. The web pages would be identical except for the color/size/shape/placement of the “Buy Button.” The A version of the page would be displayed to a random part of your traffic and the B version would be displayed to the other part of your traffic. You run this test until you reach a statistically significant amount of traffic and judge the winner based on which version had the higher conversion rate.
In a multivariate test (MVT) your goal is the same as the A/B test. You are trying to discover the best version to display to your visitors in order to get them to convert. The difference here is that instead of testing only a single element, in an MVT environment you test multiple elements. For example, in addition to testing the efficacy of the “Buy Button” in your webstore, you also want to know how the product image affects conversion rates. So you not only design alternative “Buy Buttons” but you also design alternative product images. Again, you segment your traffic so that one group sees one version of the page with Buy Button A and Product Image A and the other group sees Buy Button B and Product Image B.
This infographic from Invesp offers valuable suggestions for which elements you should test as well as important Dos and Don’ts for A/B and MVT tests. Keep in mind that the goal of testing is usually to increase revenue, but can also be used to increase click-throughs, form submissions and downloads.
Infographic by- Invesp
