I’ve been struggling with something lately. I’ve been doing a TON of SEO work on my primary sites to overtake some really competitive terms. This work has been going great and I owe a lot of it to my Virtual Assistants who have learned a ton of new stuff over the past several weeks. We’ve done an amazing job and have climbed to the top 3 if not #1 for many very worth while terms.
While this is amazing, we’re now left with a bit of a dilemma. We’re getting all of this amazing traffic, however we’re not seeing the conversions that we thought we’d be getting. I mean sales have gone up quite a bit. Obviously if we were making money from a term at #5 then as traffic increased we our sales increased at about the same rate.
However when we dig a bit closer and look at a site that is getting about 800 visits a day and is producing 4-6 conversions (that is sales) a day we have to start asking ourselves a few questions.
- Did we target the wrong keywords?
- Is our landing page effective?
- What is our clickthrough rate (CTR) to the offer?
- What is the offer converting at for our traffic to the merchant?
So that’s what we’ve begun to look at. I’ve developed a new landing page for this example site we’re talking about above and it just launched this morning. The preliminary data is less then 100 visits per page but the initial variation is kicking butt over the new version. However there are no sales from the original version and the new landing page I’m split testing had one conversion over night.
So this leads me to a second question: Is it all about CTR to the offer? How does the quality and information on our landing page affect conversion for the merchant?
Better Quality = Better Prospect?
This website is a review/comparison type site. The original landing page didn’t provide a ton of detail about the products we were comparing, instead it focussed on getting a click to the merchants site and then hoping the merchant would do their thing to convert the visitor into a sale.
The new landing page I’ve taken a different approach. It has more information and takes an objective look at the products to explain why the visitor would want to use one over another. Looking at my analytics data visitors are spending about 2.5X as much time on the new version of the landing page and have an exit and bounce rate about 25% less then the original version of the page. However the CTR to the offer is way down.
I have a theory, and the only thing that will prove me right or wrong is allowing this test to run its course, but I believe that even though the CTR to the offer from the new landing page will be lower the vistior who’s clickingthrough is a much better prospect for the sale of an item because they are more informed and made a more educated decision to clickthrough to the offer then someone from the original landing page who may just be looking for more information.
Results Don’t Lie
I’ll let this test run for a couple of days and see where the results land. I’ll follow-up with another post and let you guys know how things fare.
For split testing I’m using Visual Website Optimizer (non affiliate link) a solid tool which I’ll do a video review on sometime in the near future.
If you run wordpress as the backbone of most of your sites you cannot go wrong with Visual Website Optimizer. Also they provide heatmaps and clickthrough info for both versions of a page your split test and have an easy to use wordpress plugin so no messy code to add to the footer files of your template.