Hello again it’s Brian Lewis here to talk to you about your digital marketing. In our last segment we talked about the way to make sure that your website is the most effective marketing tool is through testing. We also talked about that if you have a small amount or low traffic and conversions to your site that the problem may be it’s going to take too long to get those results back. So what are some alternatives.
If you do have a site that doesn’t get a lot of visitors but you want to be able to find out how can I tweak that site and make it the most effective, well there’s two things we want to consider: One is a test ideation. In other words how to decide what it is we want to test. Normally we go to our analytics as a good source of information for that but if you don’t have a lot of traffic there may not be information there. So what are some other alternatives besides your web analytics to come up with ideas on what the test. Well there’s a whole slew of tools out there that can be very helpful. One tool is called a heat map and heat map is going to show you how your visitors are behaving on a particular page. It is going to show you what they’re clicking on. It’s going to show you how much how far down the page they’re scrolling. It’s going to show you mouse movement which there’s a general correlation between how your mouse is moved and where people are reading on the page. So you can get a sense for how people are interacting on that page and maybe they’re not interacting the way that supports your conversion goals. So that would give you an idea of what to test.
You can also do what’s known as user testing. And there’s user testing platforms out there – usertesting.com is one where you can recruit testers. What you do is you want to make sure you set them up with the proper context first. You want to make sure that they understand the role they’re playing and then you give a very specific task. And then they’ll record that, and there’s audio, and there’s video, and from that assess what are some things that maybe they kind of stumbled with that maybe we want to test changing. Maybe that’s either the user interface or maybe it’s the messaging or maybe the text on the call-to-action button. They kind of stumble over that. So that’s another good place to look. You may want to consider doing exit surveys. When someone leaves your site, or doesn’t have to be an exit survey, it could be when someone’s on a page for a particular length of time – you want to pop-up a survey and ask them questions about their visit experience. And make that very specific. In other words, let’s say your e-commerce, if they’re on a product detail page and they’ve been on that product detail page for a while, ask them questions related to that page which would be different than if let’s say they’re on your homepage for a while. So you want to make sure that is very relevant to whatever that particular visitor experience is.So those are some ideas that if you don’t have enough data in your analytics to come up with test ideation or test hypotheses these are other places you can go.
The other problem we need to solve when you have low traffic and conversions is how are we going to do this testing because Brian you mentioned in the previous segment that the best way to do it is to send traffic to the new page, and send traffic to the existing page, and then compare the results. But we can’t do that right because we don’t have enough traffic. So couple things you can do. One is sequential testing. Sequential testing is we’ve been sending traffic to our existing page and we’re measuring that, now let’s put up the new page and let’s measure that. Now it’s not as scientific because there are two different time periods vs A/B split testing which is the same time period. That’s still better than doing nothing at all as long as those time periods don’t really start to get extended out long.
Another thing you can do is think about buying traffic. That’s going to be kind of expensive but again we’re trying to get more traffic to our site so we can we can do an effective test. Some ideas for buying traffic would be PPC, display advertising and social media. And again it does cost money but you actually may stumble on a profitable traffic source for you that you didn’t even try before. Also think about micro conversions. A lot of companies are very focused on well I want that form to be filled out or I want the phone to be picked up and called, or I want the add to cart button or actually want someone to order something. But think about maybe a micro conversion because you have a lot more of the micro conversion, the micro conversion might be visiting the product detail page. You can have a lot more of those and you’re going to have people who are actually going to order, so you’ll be able to build up those traffic statistics a lot more.
And finally another thing that you can do for testing ideas is do qualitative testing. In other words, you have your existing page and you have your test page – recruit some user testers. And again set them up with the proper context so they understand their role and who they’re playing as the visitor on that page and then what is it specifically their supposed to do. Look at what they’re saying. We’ll see how they’re interacting and that also will tell you upfront probably what page is going to be the better performer for you. So that’s it for you guys, for the low traffic sites, it’s been great talking to you. Until next time this is Brian Lewis.
