5 ways to supercharge split testing with analytics

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: rob@optimisationbeacon.comw: www.optimisationbeacon.com