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If you do not have an active experimentation and testing program in your company then you are leaving so much money on the table that it is not even funny.
It is not too extreme to say: If you are not doing testing then pack your bags now and go home because there is no way you can win.

You are a lovely Marketer and all you want is the coveted Marketer of the Year award. Yet your website conversion rate is stuck at 2%, no matter how hard you try. Its not your fault. There are three forces that are working against you:

1. Your website is being used for purposes it has not been created for. And you don’t even know. Few website owners / Marketers / Analysts understand all of the reasons why people come to their websites (Visitor Primary Purpose).

   If you don’t know why they are there, how will you know how to create a great customer experience?

2. A monolith does not come to your site, segments do. If I unpack that statement what I mean is that even if 100% of the traffic on your site is there to buy (right now), it still is formed of many different types of customers who need to be communicated to in a unique manner (calls to action, content, promotions, and yes even buttons).
3. HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site.

   HiPPO stands for: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. HiPPO’s are your bosses, their bosses, your creative directors etc etc.

In the past you did not have too many options to counter the HiPPO’s and get your ideas to the site or why people comes to your site and what problems they have. Now you can run a simple three question golden survey and find out Visitor Primary Purpose.

You can also let ideas democracy flourish in your company: Captain Experimentation to the rescue!

In its simplest form experimentation and testing is showing two or three or fifty pieces of creative / content / promotions etc to a website visitor. After a statistically significant amount of time let the results of the test help you decide what your customers like / react positively to.

In the last 18 months or so your ability to test has dramatically improved, thanks to evolution of technology, new vendors and integrated reporting.

You can get going with your own website’s capability to do A/B/C testing (if you have a decent website platform then you are set).

Take a page on your site, tell your web server to split traffic to three different version, with your web analytics tool measure success. That’s all it takes to get your idea validated!

The cool babe of the month is Multivariate Testing. It is the ability of simply partitioning up various parts of the page and putting different pieces of content in each partition to see which combination of element works.

Here is your default page (and who on this earth does not need, nay deserve , a hundred roses?):

To test all you do is log into your multivariate testing tool, upload all your wonderful ideas, and turn the experiment. You can pump in different images into the main 100 flowers image above. You can put in customer testimonials in the white space on to top right. You can even take your boss’s wonderful idea of adding Buy Now buttons under each product.

The tool takes care of rending the pages to your website visitors and runs the experiment for you (with the only IT involvement for your company being addition of a few lines of javascript code – you the Marketer is finally in control baby!!). Each visitor to your website sees a unique page:

Now here comes the sweetest part. Analytics are included, you just sit back and wait for the green bars to indicate 95% confidence!

The tool tells you which one works for your customers optimally, and by how much. You don’t have to guess.

Convinced?

Here’s one last thing.

You can start doing multivariate testing tomorrow using the 100% free Google Website Optimizer tool. All you need is a Google AdWords account (you don’t even need to spend money on AdWords!!). You can get the code, implement, upload and start testing in a couple hours.

Once you get really good at this you can get a paid tool where you might get lots more features (initially you might not need them but later perhaps you will).

If you don’t want to go down the free route get one of the nice paid tools, Offermatica, Optimost, SiteSpect etc.

To help you choose the right tool for you (and know the kind of effort involved in your company and the impact it will have on your customers) here is a handy selection matrix:

Ms. / Mr. Super Marketer the shackles are now off! Good luck and God speed!!

You are trying really hard to figure out how to improve the performance but you are stymied by the fact that there is ton of data and you have no idea where to start. Ms. Bounce Rate to the rescue.

Bounce rate is a beautiful way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. It is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool. It is easy to understand, hard to mis-understand and can be applied to any of your efforts.

So what is this mysterious metric?

In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”.

Thought about from a customer perspective rather than I came, I saw, I conquered, the action is I came, I saw, Yuck, I am out of here.

Bounce rate measure quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.

It is usually measured in two ways:

• The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site.
• The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less).

Either definition is fine, each has its own nuance. Please check what your tool’s definition is.

So how can you use it?

Start by measuring the bounce rate for your entire website. Any decent web analytics tool will give you this as soon as you log into it. You’ll understand better why your conversion rate is so low, if you have made changes over the last x amount of time then watching a trend of bounce rate is a sure way to know if the changes you are making are for the better.

Now you are ready to dive deeper.

#1: Measure the bounce rate for your traffic sources.

Your goal is to figure out if some sources of traffic are sending you particularly terrible traffic compared to others. In your web analytics tool simply go to the Referring URL’s / Sites report and look at this number.

For this site both myspace.com and simplyhired.com is not sending great traffic, while their direct marketing campaigns (#2 and #3 above) seem to be doing much better.

Action: Do you need to revisit relationships with sites that are not sending you high quality traffic? What is the call to action that is causing people to come to your site and bounce? Are your email, affiliate, other marketing campaigns yielding low bounce rates? You get the idea.

#2: Measure bounce rate of your AdWords, AdCenter, YSM (PPC) campaigns.

In my humble experience this is one piece of analysis most agencies and companies overlook. Sure we measure conversion and roi and revenue, but are you measuring bounce rate for your PPC campaigns? Remember you can only convert if people are staying for more than five seconds on your website!

This screenshot shows the bounce rate of traffic on each keyword compared to site average, very cool view. Sadly most traffic for this time period is performing worse than site average (so literally you could be sending money down the, well you know what).

Action: First, stop bidding on those keywords, then do a deeper analysis of how good your landing pages are, and your other campaign attributes (maybe your campaign for refrigerators is being targeted to people only in the great state of Alaska!).

#3: Measure bounce rate of your top trafficked pages.

Now it is entire possible that your efforts are stellar (as they usually are) but it is your website that is letting you down. There is what to do to make your case…..

What pages are bouncing traffic like a perfectly formed elastic material and which are great at welcoming traffic with open arms into your website? Pull up the above report in your web analytics tool and find out.

Action: Check to see if the right calls to action are on the page? Is the content optimally organized? If the above pages are your campaign (direct marketing or paid search campaigns) landing pages then are they delivering on the promise of the email piece you had sent out or the search keyword? Answer these questions and consider multivariate testing to improve page performance .

Would you agree this is a awesome metric? It won’t have all the answers for you, but it will help you focus very quickly on what’s important, show where you are wasting money and what content on your site needs revisiting.

As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.

Mr./Ms. Marketer meet Ms. Sexy Metric.