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Further
Reading ...
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Simplicity as a Means to Develop your Home Based Business - Patrick Baghestani
Simplicity at its best: The Power of Transcending the Confusion Lets keep it simple. Afterall, who wants to sort through virtually millions of potentially good suggestions, and end up with nothing but confusion? There are many ways to make...
Clearing The Cobwebs - Lonnie Amirault
"Clearing The Cobwebs" Every once in a while there comes a time when you need to cross over that skip of a heart beat fine line. How can I avoid all these business opportunity scams which sound so good but leave me feeling empty? Submitted by...
Essential Equipment For Your Home Office - BB Lee
Essential Equipment For Your Home Office.. Home Office Tips by BB Lee(C)2003 This is part 4 in a series of Home Business Tip Articles. You can read previous tips at: http://www.angelfire.com/zine/smallbiz. This part concerns the basic equipment...
Networking 101 - Sue and Chuck DeFiore
As a new business owner you must wear many hats. You will need knowledge of accounting, marketing, advertising, management, administration, inventory, sales, etc., in addition to knowledge pertaining to your industry. Since you may be very...
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How One Word Or Even One Letter Can Boost Conversion Rates By Over 400%!
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Written By:
Eric Graham
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Recently I was reviewing the keyword specific conversion rate data of a consulting client of mine. I have been working with this client for a few months now, helping her improve the sales conversion rate of her website and we have had very good results, taking average conversion rates at her site from below 1% to just over 4.3%.
(Your sales conversion rate is simply the number of unique visitors your site receives vs. the number of sales you make. If you have 3 sales for every 100 visits your conversion rate is 3%.)
Now, one of the keys to improving conversion rates is to continually test and measure every detail of your website, marketing and traffic. While reviewing the data from one of her Google Adwords campaigns I stumbled across a few hard to explain results that perfectly illustrate the very large effect small differences can have on conversion rates.
The keyword “piano lessons” had a conversion rate over the last 30 days of 5.09%. The keyword “piano lesson” had a conversion rate of only 1.64%. Both of these keywords had the exact same Adwords title and description, the same average position in the search results and the exact same landing page on my clients website. The only variable is one letter in the keyword… an “s”. Lesson vs. Lessons. That’s it! Yet the plural version of the keyword (piano lessons) out sold the singular version (piano lesson) by over 300%!
Another key phrase that had an even larger variation was “how to play the piano” vs. “how to play a piano”. Common sense would say that these two phrases would convert almost identically… Wrong.
Again, with identical titles, descriptions and landing pages, “How to play the piano” converted at 5.92%, while “How to play a piano” only converted at 1.42%. That is a whopping 417% difference between “a” and “the”!
Short-term variations and fluctuations in the conversion rates of individual keywords or landing pages are common. However, the data on both of these keyword pairs was measured over a full 30 days and several thousand clicks for each keyword. I don’t have any easy answers why adding an “s” to a key phrase or changing an “a” to “the” caused such a difference in conversion rates.
Sure, you can guess at it and draw a few conclusions such as “plural keywords convert better than singular keywords” or “using ‘the’ in a key phrase is more specific and targeted than using ‘a’”. However, these conclusions are just guesses. The only real conclusion you can draw - continued below ...
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continued ...
from this case study is that you have to test EVERYTHING!
If one word or one letter can have that big of an impact in an Adwords campaign, then a similar change in your main headline or guarantee can have an equally significant impact.
The lesson here is to test, test, test. What should you test?
- Test headlines.
- Test guarantees.
- Test bonuses.
- Test colors.
- Test sub-headlines.
- Test your copy.
- Test different prices.
- Test layouts.
- Test autoresponder messages.
- Test your USP (Unique Selling Proposition.)
- Test ads.
- Test keywords.
- Test policies.
- Test images and graphic design.
- Test deadlines.
- Test navigation.
- Test your checkout process.
- Test font sizes.
- Test payment options.
- Test EVERYTHING!
Now, when you are testing a change, only test one item at a time. This part is critical. Testing only one change will help keep your results as accurate as possible. If you change 4 items at once and see a 1% boost in conversion rate, it is possible 3 items are helping and 1 is hurting, so your conversion rate boost would have been greater with just the 3 changes.
The bottom line is this…
If you really want to take your website’s sales conversion rate to the next level, you must absolutely commit to a focused and long-term campaign of testing and optimizing every aspect of your site. You never know when a small change is going to give you huge results!
Copyright 2004 Eric Graham
Want to improve your conversion rates? Eric Graham is the CEO of several successful online companies. A top authority on eCommerce & Internet Marketing, he's an in-demand speaker & consultant. Visit http://www.web-site-evaluations.com today for an in-depth evaluation to boost YOUR websites conversion rate!
Eric Graham is the CEO of several successful online companies. A top authority on eCommerce & Internet Marketing, he's an in-demand speaker & consultant. Visit www.web-site-evaluations.com for a FREE subscription to his eCommerce Mastery newsletter.
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| _Additional Resources ... |
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Basic Home Loan Terms Explained - Ethan Hunter
The wonderful world of home buying can sometimes overwhelm the first time homebuyer. They are inundated with information riddled with terms of art. ARMS, points, interest rates, good faith estimates, pay-downs, lock-in dates, so on and so forth. ...
Minimize your Risk for Identity Theft - Jeffrey Broobin
Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in America. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the number of identity theft incidents reached 9.9 million in 2003. These crimes are estimated to have taken the average victim $500 and 30 hours to...
Finding What You Want With Your Home Business - Jennifer Schilling
Do you know what you really want to do for your job? Some people dream about starting their own business and know what type of business they want to create immediately. Then there are the rest of us... Knowing we want to have a business is only...
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