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Testing & Tracking | Article #298 : TESTING AND TRACKING – PART 5

In our last installment we began to discuss actually making changes to our site and made some assumptions before we began. In this installment, we’re actually going to make some hypothetical changes to our fictional site and see what happens when we do. The results are not as important as what we learn from them and what we do after we have gained this knowledge.

Okay, as we said in our last article, our site got 5000 visitors in the first week and made 150 sales. This is certainly not bad but maybe we can improve on it. Let’s see how.

Well, the first thing that we didn’t do is include testimonials and income proof on our site. While the temptation is to add both at the same time, don’t. Why? You want to see what the effect is of each individually. Your gut tells you that adding either one of them will increase your conversion percentage and thus adding both will increase it even more. But you still want to be sure.

So pick one of them. Let’s just pick putting testimonials on the page first. Again, we will assume that you have testimonials all ready to go. Now, it’s not just a matter of putting testimonials up. You want to take a look at some of the top converting sales pages out there and see how these testimonials are highlighted. There are some common techniques used as far as design goes. Pick a design and emulate it.

Okay, you’ve put your testimonials up on the site and send it back out into the outside world. You let it run for another week to see what happens.

The results are as follows. You get 5000 more visitors in the week’s time and make 175 sales. Your conversion percentage went up from 3% to 3.5%. Okay, so the testimonials definitely helped. So leave them in and now let’s make another change to the site for the next week. Let’s put in some income proof. Again, let’s take a look at how other sites do this. No sense reinventing the wheel.

Another week goes by and you check in to see what’s happened. You’ve not gotten 7000 visitors to your site. Okay, something has happened because of the changes you made. Remember, you haven’t done any more advertising. All you’ve done is added testimonials and income proof. So the increased traffic might be coming from word of mouth, though we can’t be sure just yet. Maybe more people are talking about your site because you’ve offered them proof. Proof is something that is so compelling that it’s hard to ignore.

Anyway, you’ve gotten 7000 visitors this week and your sales for the week were 270. Your conversion percentage went up from 3.5% to 3.85%.

Okay, did you notice something?

When you added the testimonials, your conversion percentage went from 3% to 3.5% or a jump of .5%. But when you added the income proof, your conversion percentage only went from 3.5% to 3.85%. So the testimonials had a bigger impact on your conversion that your income proof. Remember that and build on it. Get more testimonials.

In our next installment of this series on testing and tracking, we’ll make yet some more changes.

See you then.

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