Foreword

When my brother Jeffrey and I first began evangelizing for conversion optimization in the late 1990s, most companies had dreams of the “new economy” and accompanying fantasies of “eyeballs” being the most important metric; we naively saw this as a C-suite responsibility. Today, most organizations have many people responsible for driving traffic but virtually no one responsible for converting that traffic into revenue. In the offline world’s equivalent, there is an executive responsible for sales (conversions) and an executive responsible for marketing, but online marketers have no counterpart.

E-commerce managers may be responsible for revenue, merchandisers for the product selection and presentation, user experience and development teams for the experience, and analytics for measurement; but it’s unclear who owns the crucial multi-disciplinary function of conversion.

I have seen a handful of companies with individuals who have conversion in their title, but they are quite rare. In those companies that do, their conversion people have access to tools and resources that demonstrate a very different corporate metabolism than those that don’t have them. These companies are also passionate about being customer-focused and data-driven, testing continuously, understanding lifetime value, and are quick to act.

Most companies aren’t structured to make conversions a core responsibility. They may assign “conversions” to the PPC manager or even the director of analytics, but they only look at it from their narrow vertical and they aren’t given the resources needed to gather the insights, to create and modify landing pages, and to set up personalization and go beyond landing pages into complex testing of customer paths.

Increasing sales conversion rates offers a greater ROI than what you can get from optimizing your traffic; either from paid or earned media. The math is simple— even if many never do the calculations. Companies with higher conversion rates almost always have better marketing efficiency ratios (net contribution/marketing expenses). The upside is that these companies make more money, and that’s a good thing. The downside is that it’s hard work to accomplish better marketing efficiency ratios. These companies are led differently; they have higher levels of collaboration and higher standards of accountability.

The top performing companies consistently convert visitors to sales at rates in the double digits. They’ve been doing that for years, while the vast majority converts at low single-digit rates. The gap between the top performers and the middle of the pack continues to grow.

However, there is great news. Over the last few years there has been an explosion of tools to help companies identify opportunities to improve, as well as tools to create landing pages and to do testing. In your hands is another critical component; Website Optimization: An Hour a Day is the resource you need to learn how to optimize your site daily. The final piece of the puzzle is, will you dedicate your time and resources to getting it done?

Bryan Eisenberg

Marketing Speaker, Advisor, and best-selling Author

Introduction

Website optimization is a newer art that tests and improves websites to better engage and convert their visitors, by combining website testing, analytics, usability, and online marketing best practices. Unfortunately, it’s not something that is quick or easy to do, and you need much more than just a testing tool. That’s where this book comes in!

Website Optimization: An Hour a Day will help you test and improve your website (no matter what type) by navigating you through important steps and common pitfalls and ultimately help you build a long-term successful website optimization program. From learning how to measure success and picking the right tools to learning best practices and high-impact test ideas for many common types of pages, you will develop a much deeper understanding of website optimization every week.

By implementing the best practices and test ideas in this book, you will stand a much better chance of improving your website in several ways, by engaging your visitors so that they come back more often, improving your conversion rates and success metrics, and ultimately increasing the bottom line revenue for your online business. Everyone wins!

And remember that testing and optimizing your website is a journey, not a destination—this unique book will ultimately serve as a great companion and compass to check while you head down the long winding road of website optimization.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is intended for anyone that wants to optimize a website for an online business and generate more revenue from it. Website optimization and testing beginners will find it very useful, in addition to those with more experience who will find advanced techniques to get even more juice from their optimization efforts.

It will be particularly useful for many types of web professionals who want to expand their understanding of the subject and help improve a website, including online marketers, web designers, web project managers, website optimizers, web analysts, web information architects, and web strategists. It will also be useful for web developers to understand the reasons why testing tools need to be implemented on websites.

It’s also beneficial for anyone who is considering moving into this newer website optimization field from a closely related online field like online marketing or web analytics (as I did). As you will read about in Chapter 1, previously there was little understanding of this field, let alone job titles relevant to it. But these days, there are many more opportunities for individuals who are skilled in website optimization and testing; for example, you can much more easily become a director of website optimization or a test manager. And it really is quite amazing to be able to influence what millions of visitors do and experience on websites.

Even “offline” business people will find it valuable to read this book and gain an understanding of optimizing online business, particularly as the line continues to blur between online and offline business worlds.

The best practices and test ideas found in this book are great for all kinds of businesses that are engaged in some kind of online business (or want to be), from individual startups to major Fortune 500 companies. It also doesn’t matter if you have a small real estate agent website or a huge multi-national online store—there are specific sections that cover test ideas for key types of pages found on many types of websites.

What You Will Learn in This Book

You will learn literally hundreds of test ideas and best practices that are designed to optimize any type of website. You will also discover how to make use of many website tools and techniques to become even more effective at optimization. Ultimately, you will learn how to better engage and convert your visitors, improve your website success metrics and conversion rates, and by doing so, make a big impact on revenue and profits for your online business.

What You Will Not Learn in This Book

You won’t learn perfect conversion rates, because there is no such thing—every online business is different and comparing is foolish. It’s much more important to beat your own current success metrics.

For the same reason, you also won’t discover a silver bullet test idea that will improve any website 100 percent of the time. While some tests have a higher chance of impact than others, there is no such thing as a perfect test—you will need to try running and iterating many of the tests found in this book before you find one that has greatest impact.

And although you won’t learn about search engine optimization (SEO) best practices in this book, you will learn about the key differences between website optimization and SEO in Chapter 1.

How Long until I See Good Results?

It’s possible to get some optimization results from using this book fairly quickly, and this can be as short as it takes for you to create and test different versions (plus a few weeks to gather some results). However, it may take much longer to get results (up to many months in the worst case), depending on how much effort is required to prioritize the test, create test variations for it, and implement.

Getting “good” results is another matter entirely. Just creating a test doesn’t ensure you will get good results, and you will need to continually iterate and learn from your tests to gain really good results. You may get lucky and get good results from one of your first tests—or you may have to wait until many more before you get your first good result. The key is to always learn from test results and to not give up!

Also, it’s not as simple as just setting up tests and waiting for results, either. As you will learn in this book, there are many internal processes you need to adopt and barriers to break down, and there are many testing best practices and fundamentals that you need to know before you can truly become effective with your website optimization efforts.

What You Need

Having an understanding of any of the major disciplines needed for effective website optimization is definitely very useful to increase the chances of success. These disciplines are web analytics, web usability, website marketing, and website testing. This book will definitely help plug some of those knowledge gaps that you might be lacking, though.

You will also need to use several tools, including web analytics tools, testing tools, usability tools, and survey tools. In order to use the more advanced tools that you will learn about in this book, you will need to obtain a budget for them (although there are some free options, which you will learn about in this book as well).

And last, you will need patience. Things won’t improve overnight, and as mentioned previously, there is no silver bullet test that will improve every website. You will require a great deal of persistence, innovation, and ability to learn from your test efforts, and by doing this, you will be rewarded with a much greater chance of website optimization success.

What Is Covered in This Book

How to Contact the Author

You can contact Rich Page on his blog at www.rich-page.com, and you can also contact him via Twitter at www.twitter.com/richpage.

Legal Disclaimer

The website optimization best practices and test ideas that are discussed in this book represent the views of Rich Page and his experience and knowledge, and not the views of any of the companies that he works for or has worked for, including Adobe Systems and Disney Online.