8 Mistakes To Avoid When Optimizing and Split Testing Your Website

8 most common mistakes to be avoided when optimizing and split testing a website

Without any doubt, optimization and split testing your website are the essential elements to ensuring the success of any online business. All the webmasters and website owners understand and implement it very well. But if we listen to the experts, they aware us about both sides of testing and optimization. If they deal with the right manner they are extremely beneficial, but on the other side, if performed in a wrongful manner, they can drive a company into the ground. Following are the most seen mistakes in the web world which can cause the serious impact on the businesses.

Must Read:

How to optimize your website freely–Quick Guide.

8 Mistakes To Avoid When Optimizing and Split Testing Your Website

1. Building of customized tools

Many web owners try to build their own set of tools in order to save the money, but in the reality, it never provides any support to the business. Rather than you invest and concentrate on developing the tools, you can invest this time and resources to the betterment of your products, services, and customer relationships.

Some recommendations:

  1. There are various affordable tools and other options are available for split testing, optimization, reporting and surveys so forget about developing a new of your own.
  2. If you have limited resources to buy one and can develop easily through your simple skills and know how to make it a simpler one. Remember your skull that you want to input in developing tool can be more productive if you utilize it on your customers instead.

2. Stopping the split tests quickly

This mistake is specifically visible in conversation rate optimization. Due to the inefficient split testing tools, in the most cases, the testing is stopped very quickly and there are not enough amount of large size samples. As per the surveys, many tests which reached 92% confidence in the beginning days of test-eventually temper out and end up with no difference between the pages being tested.

Some recommendations:

  1. It is must determine the ideal sample size for the test.
  2. The test should be stopped only when:
    • There have been 2 complete weeks of running the test.
    • There are more than 100 conversations of each variation has been tested.
    • The ideal limit of 95% confidence has been attended.

split testing a website

3. Giving extra focus over designing

It is true that the good appearance of a website attracts the visitors, but the real thing is the quality. If you’re your prettier website fails to meet the visitors’ requirements, then there is no value of investing your resources in designing. Furthermore, over-concentration on aesthetics may slow down the execution and testing velocity.

Some Recommendations:

  1. Remember, developing the solid user experience is your prime objective. And you need to craft the content that makes your message more valuable and appealing.
  2. Follow the simple visual guidelines of documentation, i.e. just think about colors, type, and the overall appearance and not on the detailed designing because they never participate in improving productivity.

4. Too many pages

Usually, the businesses have a landing page for their each and every campaign ran by them also they create a different experience for all types of the users. Such kind of practices generally slow down the optimization efforts. The experts suggest creating the many segmenting pages only if:

  • There are many winning sophisticated tests have been run by the company.
  • There is a large volume of traffic (i.e. Millions of page views).

Actually, the segmentation of traffic to the different pages results in a long time to complete a test and reduces the impact of the test.

Some Recommendations:

  • The number of pages and experiences should be kept minimum to ensure the quick and effective running of the tests.
  • You can consider segmenting your ads and campaigns by persona.

5. Ignoring the study of the customers

The website owners spend a good time and resources over developing and applying the persona based on various choice surveys, but it is not adequate to the real theme of the customers. The split tests are run with the intention of asking the visitors to vote for a winning page. In this scene, it is comparatively better if you become a customer yourself to understand them more clearly.

Some Recommendations:

  • Watch your site or page with the view of a customer and then find out the shortcomings and new fields of improvement. Of course, you should also use your own products and services to get its real picture.
  • Every chat with your customers and each email is important. Never ignore them; you will surprise that your customers are eager to give you the feedback for your product and services.

6. Failing to give a “reason why”

It is common but never noticed seriously and can influence highly on the test results. Some examples of the “reason why” type queries of the customers are given below which mostly remain unanswered or not usually satisfied:

  • Why is the product cheaper than the others?
  • Why are the prices are higher than the competitors’?
  • How do you make money?
  • Why you are offering a big discount; is it means that your product is no more in demand?

Some Recommendations:

  • Try to give reason to each of the questions because it is good to converse than being silent.
  • Ask the visitors, friends, and strangers read your emails and pages. You can also use usertesting.com to get the quick user feedback.
  • Ask your visitors to make you informed if something is stopping them from taking the next step.

split testing a website

 

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7. Avoiding to give the visitors a proof

It is also very essential to give your visitors a questionable proof of the popularity and importance of your product or service. It is also considered as the easiest and effective way of the betterment of the conversation rates. Unfortunately, most of the online business organizations ignore it.

Some Recommendations:

  1. Share the pages of the other’s publications where your product or service has been featured.
  2. Share the verified real-time usage statistics with UserStates.com.
  3. To gain the trust give a strong guarantee.
  4. You can also show the user testimonials by using an online tool such as trustPilot.com.
  5. It is also good to list the names and experience of your famous customers.

Must Read:

Seo basics:9 essentials to optimize your website.

8. Wrong interpretation of the test outcomes

If you fail to understand and correctly interpret the test results, it is the mistake that can spoil all the efforts and investment you have made in the testing process. It is advised to set the goals for the split test so that you can judge the results and their effect on their basis. Otherwise, there is no meaning of an entire headache.

Some Recommendations:

  1. While the aim of split testing is to achieve the systematic multiple wins, so you need to focus on attaining the 95% confidence before moving to the next test.
  2. Avoid the temptation of over-emphasis of the uplift value. Instead of it, you should focus on learning from these tests. Keep it in mind that the sequence wins will lead to compounded improvements in results. You need to have a long-term strategy here.
  3. Also, prioritize your requirements to prevent the complexity.
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  1. Manidipa Bhaumik April 7, 2016

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