Tips for Testing: be brave and try the extremes as well!

One of the most powerful ways to improve the conversion rates on your website is to conduct tests on your site on an ongoing basis. By comparing 2 or 3 different options for a site element, you can find out which one works best for your specific audience. Your current site element will function as the control, in addition you can create 1 or more “variations” to this element. For instance, you may have a certain headline or image on your homepage which you would like to compare with another headline copy or alternative image.

So how do you choose the “variations” for your testing? We recommend following best practices for website usability, as discussed in our TCP Course. For instance, when offering people a call to action button, make sure the button includes a benefit people receive. For instance, instead of “sign up here”, use something like “Send me my free Newsletter”.

We also recommend creating at least 2 variations to test different assumptions, one of which could be more towards the extreme. This helps to get a good feel for your specific audience and their preferences, especially when you first start testing. If they don’t like your extreme option, you know you’ve overdone it which is valuable knowledge to gain for future adjustments and tests.

Let me give you an example. For one of our consultancy clients, we tested the effectiveness of a registration page. The control page merely included an image with a Call to Action button. As a variation, we created 2 alternatives each with more guidance towards the Call to Action. One of them was relatively extreme with strong copy and a clear arrow towards the call to Action button. Our test results showed that the extreme version didn’t convert well at all! This was against our expectations, however after further analysis we understood why that particular audience responded like that. This again shows that you never know for certain what works and what doesn’t, only proper testing can give you the answers.

So try and take some chances now and then in your testing, this will give you a wider range of options to test and you will gain much more knowledge about your audience and where their preferences are.