Home improvement site, Build.com, which had online sales of more than $166 million in 2009, boosted conversion rates 23.1% and the average order value by 9% year over year, when they added personalized recommendations for similar and complementary products to its product pages.
Before adding the personalization application, they manually suggested additional items for purchase on product pages. The process was tedious and required constant updating.
Build.com added Omniture Recommendations to its site which uses algorithms to analyze visitor data to deliver relevant content to consumers based on what other consumers have viewed, searched and purchased.
The success of the program has led to extending its personalized recommendations to its category pages, home page, and marketing e-mails-which boosted conversions by triple digits.
Does your website offer personalized recommendations for similar and complementary products?
Full story at Internet Retailer »
Related: Retailers are sharpening their focus on recommendations: Survey of 100 companies found that every respondent who didn’t already have a product recommendation engine was planning to deploy one by 2011 »
Visual Website Optimizer offered free conversion rate optimization advice on Hacker News and received 50+ requests for help. As they replied and provided feedback to those 50+ sites, four common issues that affected conversion rates kept cropping up.
According to their analysis, one of these four issues (if not all) were the most common causes of poor conversion rates.
Here are those four most common landing page issues:
- Too-much text (without any apparent order and layout);
- Headline that doesn’t tell what your product or service does;
- Lack of a single prominent call-to-action (either there is none or there are too many); and
- Lack of social proof or ROI proof (who uses the service and what are the benefits).
Do your landing pages have any of these four common issues?
Full story at Visual Website Optimizer »
Original Homepage
Slimmed-Down Homepage
Tim Ferriss (of The 4-Hour Workweek fame) invested in Daily Burn, a popular diet and exercise tracking site.
Upon investing, he wanted Daily Burn to improve its homepage conversion rate, and with a few simple changes and Google Website Optimizer, they quickly improved conversions by more than 20%, then 16% again.
Here’s how they did it:
First they removed the paradox of choice issues. Instead time-consuming redesigns, they cut some HTML, temporarily eliminating as much as possible that distracted from the most valuable click: the sign-up button.
The homepage was reduced from 25 above-the-fold options (buttons and links) to 5 options and raising the media credibility indicators. Note the removal of a horizontal navigation bar. The “fold” now ends just under the “Featured On” heading.
The results?
The 1 original conversion rate leaped from 24.4% to 29.6%, an improvement of 21.1%.
Test 2 original conversion improved from 18.9% to 22.7%, an improvement of 19.8%.
Conclusion: Simplified design improved conversion by an average of 20.45%.
They went on to optimize the homepage using Google Website Optimizer. Read the full story as to what happened next…
Full story at The Blog of Tim Ferriss »
Text Buttons
Green Buttons
Orange Buttons
GSM.nl, one of the Netherlands’ largest eCommerce shops selling mobile phones, GSM plans and other mobile accessories, have ‘Buy Now’ buttons all over their website.
The challenge for this particular A/B test was that they had to vary all buttons on the site at once. A lot of pages contain multiple instances of the order button, one for each featured product.
They came up with a smart solution. All they did was create an alternative CSS stylesheet, and run the A/B test on the different stylesheets. The stylesheet defined how the ‘Buy Now’ buttons looked, so if they do a split test of stylesheet they will automatically split test all the buttons on the website.
So which button color won?
The test results showed that the orange buttons increased overall website engagement by 5%. Engagement is defined as click on any link on the page, so an increase in engagement means a reduction in bounce rate. Sales increased too, but due to the relatively short test period, did not yet prove statistically significant.
The case suggests that a bright button color catches attention, reduces bounce rate, and even helps increase sales.
Are you split testing your website’s ‘Buy Now’ button colors?
Full story at Visual Website Optimizer »
Multi-step checkout
Single page checkout
Create account after checkout
Elastic Path Software conducted A/B split testing on a multi-page checkout, against a single-page checkout with the option of creating an account after checkout.
So, which page do you think won?
After only 300 transactions the winner was clear and they stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by 21.8%.
Have you conducted A/B split testing on your checkout page?
Full story at Get Elastic blog »
Original
Test Ad #1
Test Ad #2
Test Ad #3
Test Ad #4
37Signals used Google Website Optimizer to randomly rotate five different headline and subhead combinations on the signup page.
They measured the number of clicks on any green “Sign Up” button. They ran the test for 4000 page views, because the numbers didn’t change much after about 3000 page views, so they stopped at 4000.
So which ad converted 30% better than the original?
The answer….
Test ad #1 performed 30% better than the original. Test ad #2 performed 27% better; test ad #3 performed #15% better; and test ad #4 performed 7% better than the original.
Are you split testing your sales letters? It is the quickest and cheapest way to increase sales and profits.
Full story at the 37Signals Signal vs. Noise blog »
OfficeFurniture.com launched a customer ratings and reviews feature in March and credits it with a 10% increase in conversion rates. OfficeFurniture.com has been so happy with the results of a customer ratings and reviews feature that it has added a Top Rated category to the site’s top navigation bar.
Before launching reviews on the site, the company solicited customers’ opinions by e-mail and received several hundred responses. OfficeFurniture.com, which uses customer reviews software from Bazaarvoice, has grown the number of ratings and reviews on the site to 1,400. 86% of products reviewed on the site have received four- and five-star ratings from customers. Products receiving lower marks enable OfficeFurniture.com to learn about problems with a product that it can discuss with vendors, or to make adjustments to the web site.
Does your website allow customers to add ratings and reviews?
Full story at Internet Retailer »
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