You Should Test That! Book Summary - You Should Test That! Book explained in key points

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You Should Test That! summary

Name: You Should Test That!
Rating: 4.5 (22 reviews)
Author: Chris Goward

Chris Goward

Conversion Optimization for More Leads, Sales and Profit or The Art and Science of Optimized Marketing

4.5 (22 ratings)

20 mins

Topics

Entrepreneurship Success Strategy

Table of Contents

You Should Test That!
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Learn to use tests that improve your website’s conversion rates.

Do you think of your website as a piece of art, where each page element, animation, link and headline combine to make a balanced, beautiful sculpture?

That’s a tantalizingly romantic image, but unfortunately it’s not the one that’s going to make your website help your business.

What you need is a website that functions as smoothly as possible – one that works more like a motorcycle than a sculpture: It’ll have to be constantly tested and tweaked, with new pieces added or taken away, and old pieces fixed or modified to make the whole machine run better.

These blinks show you how to make your website match your wider business goals by focusing on what is arguably the most important metric: conversion rate. You’ll also learn about which specific features of your website can improve your conversion rate, and how you can be sure your website is constantly improving.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why SEO is your conversion rate’s friend, not its enemy;
how to make visitors stay on your website longer; and
how Wordpress learned to prevent its users from feeling anxious.

Optimizing for a higher conversion unlocks hidden profits for your business.

In today’s Information Age, businesses need a good web presence if they want to succeed – even if they’re selling their products primarily offline. In fact, according to a study conducted by Experian, 90 percent of buyers research products online before purchasing them offline.

Clearly, you need a website. But not just any old website! To run a successful business, it’s not enough to optimize your website in a way that nets you huge traffic. That traffic needs to convert into immediate monetary value.

So your goal is to turn your site visitors into real customers, and that’s what conversion rate is all about.

The conversion rate describes what percentage of site visitors complete some action that you want them to carry out, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter and so on. Simply put, your site’s conversion rate is its number of visitors divided by the number of those visitors who do the thing you want them to do.

Your goal, then, is to maximize the amount of products you sell to the visitors you already have using conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Not only does CRO directly affect your conversion rate, it also helps you to avoid the halo effect caused by a poorly made website. The halo effect is when a customer’s bad experience with your website negatively affects their perception of your products.

The author, for example, recalls a visit he paid to BlackBerry’s website, which was incredibly slow due to their use of large images. Once the page was finally fully loaded, the author was met with a range of the newest BlackBerry phones under the headline: “Unbelievably fast. Unmistakably BlackBerry.”

Irony aside, this slow loading time might make it harder for customers to actually believe that BlackBerry phones are as fast as they claim. Even though the website’s loading time is entirely unrelated to the phone, that general feeling of slowness continues to hang, halo-like, over the product.

Many websites are optimized based on false assumptions.

When optimizing their website, most companies look to design agencies. The problem, however, is that a good design agency can’t necessarily optimize your site for conversion rate or revenue. While they may excel at creating a sleek, aesthetically pleasing website, they usually don’t know what your website’s business goals actually are.

In fact, many design agencies have no clue which criteria are most important for creating a successful website. This is apparent in the very first question design agencies ask their new clients: “What do you want your website to look like?”

CRO goes hand in hand with SEO.

When companies rebuild their websites, it seems like all they talk about is SEO. In their obsession with their search engine rank, some people worry that CRO will undermine all the hard work they put into climbing up to rank number one on Google.

Fixated on search engine rank, they tend to prioritize SEO over CRO. However, you need both to make a successful website, and they actually work hand in hand.

Define your website’s goals before you start testing.

Your reason for building a website shouldn’t be “just because.” You have to have a clear reason for doing so, that is, you need clearly defined goals. Otherwise, you’re simply wasting valuable time and energy. These goals need to be much more substantial than “increase sales!”

Start by defining why your website exists at all. Did you build it to offer information about your company and products? Or do you want to generate leads for your sales teams? Is it for engagement on Facebook and Twitter? Or are you hoping to cultivate a special brand image?

The LIFT model will help to identify the factors that influence conversion rate.

So how do you know which factors actually influence your conversion rate? One good way to find out is by using the LIFT model: Landing page Influence Function for Tests.

The LIFT model consists of six factors: value proposition, relevance, clarity, anxiety, distraction and urgency. Each of these factors can be improved in order to raise conversion rate.

Formulate a testable hypothesis for each factor.

Some businesses focus on only a single factor to improve their conversions. However, this is a grave mistake, as neglecting any one factor causes you to miss out on possible conversions. The more factors you improve, the better your conversion rate will be.

But to start improving the factors that affect conversion, you’ll need to develop hypotheses for them. Start by assessing each factor on your current page, and think about ways they could be improved.

Privacy and ease are the keys to reducing anxiety.

Have you ever visited a company’s website that just gave you the creeps because it felt unsafe and unreliable? That’s the anxiety that’ll kill conversion rates for even the best products. So, it’s crucial that you do everything in your power to make visitors to your site feel at ease.

We’re in the age of WikiLeaks, identity theft and controversial social-media privacy policies, so people are more concerned about their private data than ever before. Companies therefore have to try hard to prove their trustworthiness to customers and justify the collection of their information.

Try to keep your visitors from getting distracted.

Users go through two stages when they land on a new website: the initial impression stage and the message-consumption stage. Distraction is a hazard during both stages, and when you allow their attention to wander away from your value-proposition message and your call to action, then you end up with a lower conversion rate.

Distraction in the initial impression stage can cause your visitors to leave right after they arrive.

Test your hypotheses and analyze the results.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about developing a hypothesis. But how exactly do you go about testing it?

Start by building a test plan, which includes your test goals and the structure of your experiment.

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What is You Should Test That! about?

You Should Test That! (2013) dives deep into the science of conversion rate optimization, offering readers a wide range of tips and tricks they can use to turn their site visits into sales.

Best quote from You Should Test That!

Maintaining good SEO brings you more qualified traffic, and good CRO converts more of that traffic into customers.

—Chris Goward

Who should read You Should Test That!?

Any business owner who wants to unlock the full potential of their website
Anyone interested in online marketing
Web designers and marketing managers

About the Author

Chris Goward is the founder of WiderFunnel, a marketing-optimization agency that has worked with clients such as Google, Electronic Arts and Babyage.com.

Categories with You Should Test That!

Marketing & Sales Management & Leadership

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