It’s complicated.

Improving online conversion rates is far from an easy task. So many things can affect the performance of a web page that it’s immensely difficult to isolate, adapt and measure the important variables. Is it the Call to Action? The headline messaging? The layout and positioning of page elements? The copy? The truth is that it’s likely to be a combination of all the above, along with other ‘off-page’ elements that you’ve probably not even considered – online reviews and testimonials, the quality and strength of your social profiles, page load times and so on.

But it’s not THAT complicated

The important thing is to be methodical. If you’re a small team with a limited budget and modest site traffic you’re unlikely to have the resources to run a series of concurrent (multivariate) tests, so keep it simple and stick to an easily managed A/B split testing model:

• Choose a campaign or traffic source (ideally one with a reasonable level of traffic) and split these visitors between your current landing page (control) and an alternative design (hypothesis).
• Wait and see what happens. Does one page outperform the other? If so, great. That page becomes the control. Now you need another hypothesis.
• And another
• And perhaps another
• Then, when you’re satisfied that the basic wireframe of the page is optimal, move on to testing other key elements.
• Set up another A/B test, this time test variants of the Headline message. When you’re happy that this is optimal move on...
• To the call to action and then
• The imagery
• The colours in the buttons, testimonials and so on.

The important thing is to test in a carefully controlled manner.

Once you move past the first stages of wireframe testing, you should be testing very limited elements – one at a time. Just test the C2A, then the headline, next the testimonials and so on. You need to be able to isolate causes.

There’s no doubt that it’s a time consuming and sometimes frustrating process but with so much invested in your online marketing, it’s not something that you should overlook. The time spent on optimisation activities could help close the gap between visitors and customers – making your website more profitable and providing a more efficient use of a valuable resource.