Large companies like Amazon spend millions of dollars optimizing their sites using A/B split testing. Some estimates place the conversion rate of visitors to customers on Amazon’s at an amazing 10%. If all mISV sites had a 10% conversion rate for visitors to customers, each mISV owner would be able to retire in a few months on the money that their site made. Instead conversion rates to customers are much lower on most mISV sites, usually around 0.01% to 1%.
Over the past year, I’ve learnt that the two most useful (non engineering) techniques that all mISVs can use to drastically improve their sales are Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and optimization. If done right, these two techniques will increase your sales by double or triple. The best part is that mISVs can do SEM and optimization without investing any money, unlike other traditional techniques like advertising.
While SEM is not simple, it is simple to see if you are succeeding. As long as your search rankings in the various engines improve, you know you are doing SEM right.
However optimization is a whole different animal. If you don’t change exactly one variable, you’ll never know what affected your conversions. If you change more than one variable, you might also get less of an improvement, since one variable might cancel the affect of another one. Finally, if you don’t carry out careful experiments and document the results, you might take two steps back for every step forward, actually hurting, rather than improving your conversions.
I started experimenting with optimizing my website http://www.amfsoftware.com sometime around July 2007 and over the course of these experiments I learned a lot of valuable lessons, both in desigining the experiments as well as optimization. I carefully documented these results and I realised that this was valuable information that could benefit the mISV community.
So here you are. All the results of my experiments will be posted to this blog, along with posts on optimizing in general.
Welcome to the optimization blog!
Posted by Diangy Systems at 10:34 AM.
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I think it’s really valuable that you’re doing this and documenting it for others.
In my opinion the most difficult thing about split testing is deciding what to test. There are an infinite number of random changes that one *could* make and split-test the effect of, but it’s more difficult to pick the ones that have a fair chance of improving things.
The reality is that you can’t realistically test everything. This is perhaps even more important to realize if you don’t have a lot of traffic. For example, my main software product has a really nichey website that doesn’t get an awful lot of traffic despite being near the top of the search engines for some good keyphrases - when you’re in that position, it takes a long time to get meaningful results from a split test, so it’s critical to make sure that the split tests you run are likely to have a useful outcome (i.e. the new change is an improvement over the old way). Otherwise you’re waiting months to get the results of a test that don’t get you any further.
Anyway, where I’m leading is to say that seeing the things that work for you in your optimization will be excellent as inspiration for others to use in their optimization. Naturally every website is different, but I’m sure that many of the findings that you come up with will be applicable elsewhere.
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