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Imagine a page with 158 different links on it. This page is critical to your sales funnel, but with so many links, there are thousands of paths your visitors could find. Some links go to new pages. Some go to other parts of the page. Some open overlays. What's an optimizer to do?
This is a daunting, if not impossible, task to instrument using traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. Click-tracking "heatmap" tools will tell you where visitors are clicking, but they have limited abilities to segment traffic, and they don't handle overlays or fly-out menus well.
The solution? Consider using a split testing tool.
By setting click goals during our split tests, we were able to get a very clear picture of where visitors were clicking on this complex page. We were able to discern the language that activated visitors' left mouse button and moved them closer to converting.
These insights shaped our choice of language to test and guided us to those pages most likely to influence conversions.
Testing Tools: They're Not Just For Breakfast Anymore
Split tests are studies of what works on your website. By "works," we mean generates more revenue, more leads, or more subscribers.
Properly set up, split tests are also good at answering the question, "Why?" Why did a certain treatment succeed or fail? What kinds of visitors made it through to the ultimate goal?
We often portray split testing as something different from studying analytics data. It really isn't � it is a way of collecting additional data. This data is comparative and quantitative. It controls for the "history effect," that is, things that change over time. In short, it is some of the most reliable data you can gather.
While you may see the primary job of split testing software as directing traffic to different versions of a page, don't overlook the intricate and flexible tracking capabilities built into it.
When Analytics Let You Down
It's somewhat unreasonable to ask a data analyst to anticipate all of the questions you might ask about your website and design data collection strategies for them. At the very least, it's expensive.
Split testing tools provide a way to instrument paths and funnels with amazing accuracy. In fact, we have run split tests with no split just to collect data on visitors. The targeting is sophisticated.
Lighting Up Your Funnels
Developers make choices that confound optimizers. Often, we will encounter a multiple-step cart or registration process for which the URL never changes. In a traditional analytics setup, this makes the funnel invisible. However, your split-testing tool can see it.
In one example, we selected elements unique to each page in a signup process and tracked clicks on them. This indicated that the visitor had come to the page and continued entering data. |
