It doesn’t matter whether you are Amazon or a newbie to making money online, if you want to convert as many visitors to your site into buyers as possible, you need to A/B test.
Every website is different, every product is different, and every audience is different, so there is no way to predict exactly what will cause your website to succeed. The only way to know what works and what does is to try out a few different versions of your landing pages and testing them against each other by using a tool like Google Website Optimizer.
But if you have just started testing, you will need to abide by a few principles in order to make the most of your time and effort. Here are few things to keep in mind as you start tweaking your site for success.
Think Outside the Box
When most people start testing elements on their web page, they stick with changing only basic things like layout, copy, and color. While changing these things can have a huge impact on your conversion rate, don’t forget about often-overlooked elements.
Think about changing stuff like
Headers
Footers
Font Style
Font Size
Rollover Effects
Social Media Icons
You will be shocked by how seemingly inconsequential alterations to your pages cause big spikes.
Nothing Is Sacred
When testing, don’t be afraid to throw out the rule book occasionally. Make colors on your page totally clash. Choose headlines that don’t even make any sense. Use Comic Sans. As most experienced testers already understand, it is really difficult to predict what will cause a huge uptick in conversion and what won’t. People are strange, and what gets them to actually take the action you want them to take can be unusual of weird.
While applying best practices is generally a good idea, don’t be afraid to swing for the fences occasionally and try a crazy variation. Since you can always go back to the original version if it turns out to be a huge miss, you never have anything to lose and a whole lot to gain.
Sweat the Small Stuff
Don’t overlook tiny elements on your website. Changing just one word or graphic a teeny bit can have a noticeable impact on visitor behavior. Google once famously tested 41 different shades of blue while optimizing for conversion, some of them so similar in hue the difference is barely noticeable to the human eye. While you don’t have to go to that extreme, you shouldn’t be afraid to test things that are only slightly different from each other.
Never Stop Testing
Testing isn’t something you do for a day, a week or even a month. It’s something you have to continuously do in order to get the best results from your Internet marketing efforts. As the test slowly starts to show you exactly what kind of site gives you the results you want, you will keep getting more and more successful.