Tip to Convert Website Traffic
There comes a time in every web site owner’s life where you’d like to improve the productivity of your web site. You have the feeling that if you changed a few things around, your site might do better, but how do you know if your changes made a difference?
When you’re planning on making a change to your site, the best way to find out if a certain change makes things better, worse, or doesn’t change anything at all, is to perform a split test.
Notes:
Here’s the link to Google’s Website Optimizer
You might ask “Can’t I just make a change and, using my analytics package, see if more people sign up than before? Just compare the sign-up rate from week to week to see if it got better or worse?”
You can do that, except you never know if something outside of your web site influenced the changes you’re seeing. Let me give you an example:
If you sell flashlights and you make a change to your web site, what would happen if a major portion of the united states was hit by a storm and all their electricity went out? Let’s say people started ordering flashlights for their relatives in those areas through your web site. If you just changed something on your site and then see that sales suddenly went up, you wouldn’t know if it was because of the change to your site or because of the storm.
Because of outside influences, it’s possible the your site is less effective because of the change you made even though sales went up. A split test will take outside influences into account so you’d know for sure.