5 ways to supercharge split testing with analytics
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5 Ways to Supercharge Split Testing With Analytics
Presented by Rob Kingston
About Optimisation Beacon
• Ex-Hitwise, >6 years experience in digital• Analytics + conversion optimisation focus
Analytics + optimisation blog
Agenda
1. Split testing 101
2. A little quiz
3. Using GA in your split testing process
4. Question time
Split testing: Analytics sorcery
Page A
Page B
Traffic
100 sales
125 sales
50%
50%
Winner: 25% more sales
A LITTLE QUIZ
Which form was completed more?
Source: http://whichtestwon.com/archives/8154Winner by 88.7%
Long form vs. Short form
Which offer drove more clicks?
Winner by 171%
Free offer vs. No offer
Source: http://whichtestwon.com/archives/3889
Which form got more subscribers?
Winner by 14.5%
Source: http://whichtestwon.com/archives/3889
Short text vs. long text
Why split test?
• Our guts are often wrong 1, 2
– Microsoft: 33% ideas win– Amazon: 50% ideas win– App Sumo: 12.5% ideas win
• Testing helps us actually improve conversion rates
1: http://exp-platform.com/Documents/2010-04%20ExP%20SDForum.pdf 2: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/a-b-testing-tips/
Why split test? Cont.
• “Companies that split test convert better”
Source: http://success.adobe.com/assets/en/downloads/whitepaper/Adobe2013DigitalMarketingOptimizationSurvey_FinalReport_April2013.pdf
Hardest part: What do we test?
• GA is one of many data sources to use:
Test Ideas
USING ANALYTICS TO AUGMENT YOUR TESTING
1. WHICH PAGES SHOULD I OPTIMIZE?
Can’t go past the goal funnel reports
• Absolute staple
• Start from the highest abandonment pages
Top landing pages
• Another staple report– Content– Site Content– Landing pages
• Go for high-traffic, low conversion rate pages
Find out how much traffic you need…
• Use traffic values to pages for your sample estimation:
• http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-split-test-duration/
2. WHAT IS THE VISITOR’S INTENT?
Look at the referrers of your test page
• Drill down in the content or landing page reports by traffic channel / keyword
Look at the internal search terms
3. WHICH ELEMENTS ARE WORTH TESTING?
In-page analytics
• Content > Site Content > All Pages > In-Page
See which links are used
• Maybe my headlines need some work:
Visitor, Y U NO click blog post!?!
Sometimes, outbound links tell you what visitors want to see on the page
Tons of heat on this button…
Adding “What we cover” to this page sold $20K in policies each month
In-page Analytics is semi accurate
• Enhanced link attribution helps distinguish between multiple links to same page
• Go here to install it:– https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2
558867?hl=en&ref_topic=2558810
4. TRACKING EXPERIMENTS IN GA
But Rooooooob…. Optimizely does this already
Well… GA has some tricks up its sleeve:
1. Reports and filters – already setup
2. Redundancy + retroactive reporting
3. Keep your tool/agency “honest”
Plus - All the cool split test tools do it…
• Optimizely• Visual Website Optimizer• Cohorts.js (my personal favourite)• Unbounce
Just collect the data and crunch it in your favourite calculator
• http://www.optimisationbeacon.com/tools-tweaks/graphing-abn-split-test-calculator/
OK. There’s more to it, but read my latest post (when it’s live)…
5. FORM OPTIMISATION
Track your form fields with GA
Which fields are scaring customers?
Field Visits Abandonments
Name 1992 5.82%
Email 1876 5.54%
Number 1772 27.37%
Postcode 1287 6.92%
Conversions 1198
Fewer fields are better… usually
Hint: Pre-fill “difficult” fields
The code to track form fields
• Here’s the code (trivial to add via Google Tag Manager):https://github.com/MartijnVisser/form-tracker/blob/master/form-tracker.js
• Note: Requires jQuery
Lead gen sites: Track actual sales
• You can do this by tracking lead IDs and your split tests in GA…
Split test variation
Lead ID
Google Analytics
CRM / Sales
Database
http://www.optimisationbeacon.com/analytics/track-leads-from-traffic-source-to-point-of-sale-in-google-analytics/
Questions?
If we don’t have time, come chat with me afterwards (I don’t bite)
Robert Kingstonm: 0409487930e: [email protected]: www.optimisationbeacon.com