Importance of Testing Websites

I have learned a lot about the importance of testing sales letters and websites, rather than just going with your preferences and instincts.

For example, in October, I published my book Stock Trading Riches. If you go to that site now, you will see the latest best performing sales page.

After I created the original version of this page, I started having remorse - thinking that this page was too amateurish. I became disheartened every time I saw more "slick" sales pages. So, I soon replaced this page.

I decided it would be cool to have a site with several short pages that were tied together with a menu.

By this time, I also had testimonials. Since I heard that they were very important, I added a few of them.

After a month, I saw that my sales had decreased!

I decided that maybe I should switch back to a one-page website. I then created a minimalist page. I decided to leave off the book cover, and tighten up the headlines and text. I also included the testimonials.

I thought this site would be great because it was simple and minimal, with "tight" action-oriented sentences.

Yet, the sales were also not as strong as the first page.

Luckily, I had added Google analytics to all the websites, and had 4+ months of data, with hundreds of visitors. After I analyzed this data, along with my book sales, I got a surprise!

I found that the "amateurish" page converted 9.6% of each unique visitor into a book sale!

The multi-page site converted 4.65%.

The "tight" page converted 3.64%.

I then switched back to the "amateurish" page! ;-)

Now, the conversion rates were after the 3 sites were allowed to run about 5 weeks each, and each had over 100 unique visitors. So, these results might not have a high degree of confidence statistically (I need to start using a statistical package like MuVar), so I did 2 things:

1. Kept the other two sites.

2. Went back to the original site without modifications.

I plan to run the original site and collect more data. If it still gets better results than the other 2 sites, I will be confident and use the first site as the base.

Then, I can start to make and test incremental changes to ratchet up the conversion rate.

By the way, I would be interested in hearing any comments about why you think this website gets almost a 10% sales conversion rate.

My own guess is that it was written with passion, rather than in a "calculated" manner like the other two.