How Can You Improve Conversion Rates with A/B Testing?
Running an A/B test can have significant positive effects on your site and your conversion rate.
Video Transcript
Onawa: I had one. I was looking today at keywords again where you say easy to contact form on every page. When I looked at the page, it does have buttons every 5 seconds saying schedule a free consultation, which just takes you to a contact page. There is no form on the page. I’m also wondering, first, if I should have just a form for ease. And if there’s a way to test whether people are clicking the contact button more than the Schedule Free Consultation. So, I can kind of A/B test conversions or whatever on that. Because it says Schedule Free Consultation. And for me, that would be like setting up a meeting specifically, not just the contact form. I’m just wondering which is a better way to say that.
David: I like the way you phrase the question in terms of an A/B test because that is really the only way to know. Unfortunately, my preferred A/B test solution, which is Google Optimize, is going away. And I don’t have a good solution for A/B testing. Do you, Dave? I feel like you do.
Dave: It depends on what you’re doing. I know some of the plugins that are out there. We use CartFlows for some of the pages –the checkout and cart. We can also use those for landing pages, as well. They do have built-in A/B testing. If you use an external builder like Leadpages, they do give you that option. But for WordPress, in general, I don’t know.
David: There’s always what I call the poor man’s A/B test, which is to run a variation for a month and see what happens.
Dave: That’s a good idea.
David: It’s not perfect, but if there is a dramatic difference, good or bad, you’ll know. What I’ve done is… I really like the StoryBrand framework, and I have a client that was really scared of it because it didn’t say what they thought customers really liked about what they have to do. And I’m like, let’s just give it a try. And so, what I was able to do was convince them to have a StoryBrand page and the traditional page. This was when we were doing paid search, but the point was we weren’t able to do a properly valid scientifically valid A/B test. But I was able to show them pretty conclusively after running it for a couple of months, wow, look at the conversion rate of this page versus that page. I phrased it in terms of if we had had that on the other page, we would have gotten X number more customers if the conversion rate was applied to the traffic, to the old page, And they’re like, holy crap, let’s do it! Right? And so, we were able to convince them without a fancy A/B test. I was doing it, in a sense, as an A/B test because I was sending paid traffic to it, and that really helped. And with organic traffic, it might take a little bit longer. But what you could do is, with one page with a lot of traffic, try it with a form. Right? And then leave the other pages as is. Then see what happens. But your intuition is right. Contact Us is very vague but less actionable than, I forget the example you gave of an actionable call-to-action.
Onawa: Yeah. It’s Schedule a Meeting. Something like that.
Dave: Yeah. Schedule Consultation. Book a Meeting.
David: But the A/B test is important because maybe people aren’t ready for a meeting yet. Maybe they want to talk to you before scheduling a meeting. Right? And the A/B test will help you because different industries work differently. Like when people are vetting me for SEO, they’re not ready to buy right away. They want to vet me, to get to know me first. So, Schedule a Meeting might be a little scary. They might want to start with a Contact Us. Hey, David, this is Onawa. Can you even help me? And whatever. There could be arguments made for a less direct call-to-action to be more effective depending on the industry. But an A/B test is the right way to do that.
Dave: Yeah. So, the good thing is the inexact method, I think, is good enough. But that would be good if you want to test one or two things. If you had more, like maybe you could change the button name to How Can We Help. So, if, say, you wanted to try like six or seven things, it’d be great to have the tool. It would kind of rotate through those over the course of a month or two months, and you can see them all.
David: Well, within Curious Ants, here is a process called conversion rate optimization, which gives lots of examples of things to A/B test. And some of them are from this Google playbook that was leaked, probably with full control of Google, on different best practices to get more conversions from websites. And so, those might be ways… The process is intentionally vague because what I hope you do every once in a while, based on the time frame, is to try something new to get more conversions. Right? And what you should try depends on your business and your website. I’m just trying to say every so often try something to get more conversions somehow because, again, we’re really trying not to provide rank as an SEO success, but conversions. And if we get the client thinking about conversions, our life as an SEO provider is going to be a lot happier. And we’re providing more value for the clients rather than chasing rank again. When you can get the client to shift from rank to lead, your life as an SEO provider is immensely happier. And the client’s happier.