Actually, I learned a lot from you back in the day. I started in 2002 when this whole interweb thing was really kicking off. I started in MLM, and quickly realized that wasn’t the game for me. I found Internet marketing, and affiliate marketing, failed miserably for a handful of years, then found a bit of success and went full-time in 2005.

I was the number one affiliate for one site, and then became a partner there. We grew the company to millions of dollars in profit, and then I sold my share and went into private consulting. People were hung up on the technical aspects of marketing. Then in the last few years, we’ve formalized it, built a team, and really just took it to a whole new level.

Optimization is not all about split testing. Split testing is just the tool we use to prove or disprove a hunch. Optimization is finding what makes your visitors tick, and then leading them down the path of least resistance to your end goal.

You have to look at your data. That’s the biggest thing. I saw a statistic recently that 97% of website owners collect data of some sort, but less than 30% actually did something with it.

When’s the last time you logged in to your Analytics account?

You have to look. Your visitors will tell you exactly where they’re having hang ups.

I usually start there. Pick one or two traffic sources. Then, figure out where people are falling out within that path. Based on the analytics, then, we survey our lists to find out what their biggest pain points are. The more information you have on how to best deliver your product, the better off you are.

Then we move to competitive analysis. We look at competitors in the marketplace. We look for the low hanging fruit. You might be getting 2% of your traffic taking up your free trial, but only 5% of that taking your upsell. So your low hanging fruit there would be figuring out how to get more people to take your upsell.

That’s a big friction point. You might have a video sales letter, and your analytics will tell you that 80% of viewers leave at minute three; so you’d want to look at minute three and try to figure out how to push people to minute four.

Yeah–I just want to see where they’re going.

What are they paying attention to the most?

We look at the path that they’re taking, and we analyze those existing pages. So we see maybe that the bounce rate is really high on the page. Anything that shows us what’s holding people back.

You might think that people are going one route, but after taking a look at your high traffic pages, you might find that people are taking an entirely different path.

A lot of them are just using Google. Mixpanel has been good. Those are the basics. We don’t try to reinvent the wheel with our analytics. Most people already have Google hooked up and are collecting data, so we just go with that.

Another tool that we leverage is Heat and Click Maps. It couples with the analytics to tell you where on those specific pages people are falling off. We also use Crazy Egg, it’s kind of our favourite.

I think you can start seeing some data when you start seeing several thousand unique visitors.

With split testing, we split everything up into three buckets. We have volume of traffic, first–we typically want to run a minimum of 1,000 visitors per variation before we run anything based on that specific data.

But we mostly drive it on the number of conversions. We try to get at least 25 conversions before we start looking at data. Unless, of course, there’s a clear loser right out of the gate, and there’s a landslide difference.

And then we try to run it to 90% significance to account for variation in the platform. But that doesn’t always

That’s kind of a case by case basis. If you’ve got a hundred transactions but equal traffic, every transaction will swing it. So instead of running it longer to try to squeeze out 5% or 10% improvement, we’ll often cut that and go test something else.

You could be doing higher leveraged tests. On huge volumes, that 5% makes a difference, but most companies don’t have that kind of budget.

So if you’re that close and you’re not seeing a 20%+ improvement, cut it and go do something else.

We look at distractions, first. Make sure your page has one specific goal. Typically it’s just with B2B, because in B2C you just have a landing page and ask for an email. You don’t want to have multiple calls to action, and you don’t want to have anything that distracts people from that goal. The leveraging of benefits–nobody cares about the features of the product, but they care that it will solve their problems.

Strong headlines. We’ve seen 35%, 55% improvements just by changing headlines. We look for proof elements, social proof–awards, testimonials, things of that nature. And then a strong call to action–telling visitors what to do instead of assuming they know.

You might have a free trial on, but then at the bottom of the page you might have a demo, or the Contact Us button. So then people might get distracted, and consider taking the demo instead, or just contacting you. It’s aside from the main goal that they came to the website for, which was the free trial.

Or just cluttering up the page. If you have a basic lead generation landing page, having a big fat menu bar that’s pulling everyone in fifteen directions. Just emphasize and leave the call to action. It’s the path of least resistance, right, if there’s 5 different paths to take, you’ll lose conversions.

If you want to get someone into a trial, we emphasize that trial and then supplement a bit if we need to.

If you have a homepage, and you want to pack it with information, that leads to a ton of distractions. So we’d want to use page elements that lead people to the goal–the trial. We use consistency in button colour and calls to action to guide people.

It goes into a multi-step process too. You might go to an e-commerce site and notice that the add to cart button is black, because the rest of the scheme is black. This is part of a test that we ran recently.

So the colour scheme of this site was black, and the shopping cart button was also black, and the next page was black. There was consistency. But we actually tested away from black, and we tried an orange shade. It increased clickthroughs and add to cart by 35%.

Then on that next step, we led them down the path using the same colour button. We want them to add to cart, to go to the checkout, and to actually click submit. All of those buttons are the same colour.

We kind of subconsciously led them down the path with those buttons.

It’s weird, because that’s usually a highly visual market. So it comes down to market, but it also comes down to things like having controls on the video, autoplay or not, placement–all of it factors in.

Majority of the time, a perfectly placed video, we see a 300%+ improvement.

Some of the largest benefits in the supplement market are going to questions and a survey type process. It’s short and direct, leads strongly with the benefits, and then goes into an image heavy, benefit driven landing page, or it goes straight into a VSL that’s 15 to 18 minutes long.

It’s a bit skewed. It really depends on what is being sold.

It’s typically–Ryan Levesque is the person to talk to about this lately. Start with small questions. Are you a man or a woman? Those are all micro commitments. Then at the end, you ask for an email. Then that takes them into the video process.

A weird example here, is we recently tested it on our own lead generation. We were running pay per click traffic, to a long form survey, and we just weren’t getting the numbers we wanted.

So as a test, we put it into SurveyMonkey, and we got a 1000% increase.

Well if you claim one thing in an ad, you need to deliver that on the landing page. I saw an ad recently, for an embroidery company with a 50% off offer. Click on the ad, get to the landing page, and it says nothing about 50% off whatsoever. On the page, it actually said something about 35% off.

Immediately I didn’t know how to claim the offer, so I bounced. It’s so important to carry over that message. You could use the same images, headlines, bullets–make it as close to the ad as possible.

For one, use them. People are very visual. The images are to break it up. We also use imagery to back up the benefits as much as possible. Instead of having a picture of somebody on the beach with a laptop, have an image that’s directly related to the product.

We ran a test recently for the software market, one image was a woman smiling on a laptop, and the other was a more technical image that highlighted the benefits of that exact solution. We saw a 67% improvement just by highlighting the benefits within that image.