Summary

The goal is to continually discover and quantify the most effective experience for users through A/B testing, moderated user testing, watching user sessions and data analysis. 

 

The process

  • Listen to users, sales team, leadership, customer service, sit in on calls to the call center...really, anyone who is a customer, potential customer or works regularly with customers. The purpose is to gather ideas and pain-points to test.

  • A/B test using visual editors built into tools like Google Optimize and Adobe Target to quickly test multiple variations so real users can show us what makes them convert, instead of wasting valuable time and dev resources implementing guesses.

  • Watch user sessions to see how users interact with the site. "Rage clicks" and "dead clicks" are two of my favorite ways to see how a site isn't reacting the way your customer wanted or thought it should. I set aside at least two hours, twice a month to watch user sessions. Once a particular user interaction catches my attention, I check to see how many other users are having the same issue.

  • Study site data to see where users fall away, what pages get the most traffic, what pages are the lowest converters, what assets have low interaction...these are all fodder for optimization!

DISCLAIMER

I love to test...I love when my theories are right and I love when my theories are wrong. Testing is the best way I know to stop chasing butterflies (adding new features just because they're cool, doing something just because the competition does it, making changes at the whim of...well, anyone) and truly start to move the needle. 

A/B TEST INCREASED REVENUE MORE THAN 400%

As part of a larger project to increase the eCommerce Conversion Rate on GiftCardGranny.com, a website that sells discounted gift cards. Users were able to see the discounted amount they would pay, but the percentage of discount was not clearly marked.

Using Google Optimize, I was able to set up an A/B test within minutes for five variations were split equally across 100% of the site’s brand page traffic.

results.png

“Save 6%” was the winning variation, increasing the Calculated Revenue per Session by more than 400%.

Now that the company had empirical data to inform their decisions for how to communicate discount amounts, they made that change on the website, app, email marketing and social media marketing.

 

A/B TEST TO INCREASE PAGE TRAFFIC

Every page on Brookdale.com has Find a Community in the navigation. It is the gate-keeper to generating leads for Brookdale's 1,100+ communities.

I thought changing the font color would increase conversion, but also tested increasing the font size.

Who would have thought increasing the font size by two pixels could create a 40% lift in the conversion rate!

 

User Session Optimization

While watching user sessions using Full Story for Brookdale, I realized there was a high number of "dead clicks" on the Browse by State dropdown.

As a result, I tested adding a list of states as well as replacing the dropdown.

Having both the dropdown and list of states created a 12% lift in conversion rate than the dropdown alone and a 4% lift in conversion than the list alone.

An added bonus was an improvement in SEO.

 

A/B Test to increase calls

The goal was to funnel more calls to the national call center for Brookdale (where they can be consistently tracked) than to individual communities.

I tested different combinations of changing the icon colors and font sizes.

The winning experience resulted in a 31% increase in calls to the call center.