4 Ways to Improve your Website using Testing

“Test, Test, Test”

Krista Seiden, Google Analytics Advocate from Google US, at the 2015 Analytics Conference.

If you learn nothing else from this blog, let it be that testing matters – and the more, the better.

This was Krista Seiden’s mantra from her presentation at this year’s Analytics Conference in Sydney and Melbourne. Testing is the way to navigate around the issue of logic, “We’re doing it this way because it’s the way we’ve always done it.” If you’re interested in conversions and good user experience, it’s time to get familiar with testing.

Testing isn't all about whether or not the blue button is better than the orange button, it’s about helping you achieve your digital goals, gain leads, improve user experience and ultimately increase conversion rates (which is what we’re all here for, right?).

Luckily for you, we’ve come up with four ways you can capitalise on the greatness that is testing:

1. Define your goals

Diving head-first into a campaign or analytics data is a maverick move. Instead, make sure you’re taking the time to focus on your business goals and objectives, so you’re making decisions that actually improve the business. Start your testing experience off with knowing what you’re testing and what you want to achieve from said test. For example, if you’re a cinema operator who wants to improve ticket sales, take a look at your current results and use that as a baseline for determining your goals and KPIs.

2. Download our white paper

Because testing is much more than an A/B test of your landing page, we’ve created a white paper to help you learn the true definition of testing in digital marketing. We also cover what testing tools are available and how to avoid the four fails of testing. This paper is a must read and available to download for free.

3. Create a culture of optimisation

It can be challenging to find the time to test everything, especially if your day-to-day workload is as large as ours! However, it’s the best way to make sure you’ve optimised your website and you’re meeting your organisation’s goals. According to Krista Seiden, testing goes beyond just the individual, it’s about creating a culture of optimisation within your organisation (which makes sense, considering you don’t want to spend your entire marketing budget launching blindly into campaigns that don’t make sense or aren’t backed up by your colleagues). Here are three tips from Krista’s Conference presentation that will help your office adopt a culture of optimisation.

1. Triple check everything (including the data)
2. Celebrate big wins
3. Brag about it; make decks and present them to shareholders

If you need a hand getting started, Krista has shared a handy A/B Testing Road Map and a Test Design Template for you to make a copy of.

4. Test everything

For a lot of businesses, conversions also happen in real life, so if you’re not testing what happens offline, you’re going to miss out on valuable insights. Your digital marketing strategy should be tailored to offline user experiences as well, and we should be testing this too. For example, you can measure your offline conversions using complex Google AdWords strategies or a campaign tagged URL. Universal Analytics is also a great way to gain useful insights into how your customers interact offline too. Remember: the more data driven a marketing decision is, the better it will perform, so make sure you test everything!

And finally, because we learn by repetition, here are those golden words once more: test, test, test!