“Always be testing.” It’s something of a mantra among data folk and it’s also the name of Bryan Eisenberg’s definitive 2008 book on testing website content.

A great analogy for website testing is the supermarket. They experiment with everything, by putting different products at eye-level to see what people buy, or by adding point-of-sale displays for impulse purchases.

Testing is the reason they put the milk all the way at the back because statistically, if someone pops in for something they need (milk) there’s a chance they’ll walk past something they don’t need and buy it anyway (10 kilos of cat food and some batteries, for example.)

If a supermarket can increase its sales by even half a percent by making a change, then they’re going to make that change. So if a change to your website’s layout might have the same impact, then that’s a change worth making.

Thinking up changes to test is a great brainstorming exercise for your team. Some of the most common things to test are:

• Call to action button text and colour
• Image placement
• Including or excluding item price
• Including or excluding the price of postage
• Entire page layout changes

Google Analytics has a feature called Content Experiments that will let you test different variations of a page to see which one converts best. It’s incredibly easy to get set up. These are the steps you’ll need to go through:

• Set up a conversion on your site, whether it’s a purchasing a product or submitting a contact form
• Identify one or more pages that you want to test. These could be product pages, checkout pages, anything you like
• Create multiple versions of the pages you want to test
• Tell Google Analytics about where to find the different versions, and add some code to each page
• Launch your experiment!

Once launched, the experiment will run until a winner is found, and you’ll get an email telling you which was the winning page. You will then, of course, probably want to test the winner against some other variation, and repeat.

But one word of warning, testing can be addictive!

About the author

Damion Brown is Principal Consultant at Data Runs Deep, a web analytics consulting firm based in Melbourne. He works with organisations to help them find the right mix of digital analytics platforms, then trains internal resources in how to work with and interpret the data. To find out more, visit datarunsdeep.com.au.

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