The Secret Behind Testing and Measuring on Your Website
Making and Testing Changes
Posted by Adam Hayes
Small changes can have a huge impact on usability and profits of your website.
What can you do to know which little things are important? Testing, testing, and more testing. Many things can have an impact on the visitors to your website. Is the background color of your website affecting how long your visitors stay? Is that button not noticeable enough? Does that word at the beginning of the paragraph make people not want to read further? How can you know? Testing! Make a small change, and see what it does.
Here are 5 metrics that need to be checked when testing the effect of a change:
- # Of Visitors
- Conversion Rate
- Average Sales
- Margin
- Overhead
Why would it be important to measure these? Because you have some control over them. Making changes on your website can have an effect on any or all of these items. You should establish a system for measuring, testing, and optimizing your website. Using such a system can help you:
- Get more and better qualified visitors
- Learn what visitors really want
- Present better and increase your conversion rate
- Price more accurately
- Increase the effectiveness of your merchandising
- Understand your errors and learn from your mistakes
- Train others
Begin the process of testing and measuring today. Small changes a little at a time can help improve your website, but you have to be able to measure the changes or you won't know.