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For the last couple of months there has been a frenzy here in our web marketing department about A/B testing and Conversion Rates. Why the frenzy? Basically because all elements came into place: we developed a high performance A/B testing module within the eCommerce platform, we finished rolling out Omniture Site Catalyst on the shopping carts and we improved the template editing areas for all the accounts so it’s easier than ever to start testing templates.

We have finished quite some tests so far, some with better results than others, so we are pretty confident on making some bold statements on the 3 factors that impact conversion rate in our experiences.

Do you have good quality traffic?

Among our clients we have vendors who have chosen to use the default and still have very high funnel conversion rates (more than 60% of the visitors entering the cart finish a transaction) and some with highly customized shopping carts that don’t even come close to 1% funnel conversion rate. Yes, the main factor that impacts the conversion rate is the quality of traffic.

When sending the visitor from your website or software product to the shopping cart make sure this is what he expects. Even better, let him know that he is going to be taken to a third party shopping cart on a secure environment. Maybe they would buy your product, but trying to force them to do it will most likely get them away from your website. So quality traffic means visitors that when getting to the shopping cart this is where they expect to be (they know the price, selected products, and additional options are not pre-selected).

Forcing users to the shopping cart just ain’t the right strategy. Most of them don’t return to your website but rather exit for good and you lose any chance in persuading them to engage with your website or your products.

Customized beats default

We’ve been working hard on making improvements to the default shopping cart provided by Avangate and we are continuously getting stuff rolled out in order to increase the conversion rate. Whenever we did an A/B testing between the default shopping and a customized one, the latter always won by around 2 or 3 percentage points at least. Sometimes all we did was to change the header of the cart and place the client logo and even that did much better than the default shopping cart.

Going deeper into the process got us even better results.  The fact is that customizing the cart in a way that the user feels he is still in the same website always rocked the conversion rate. We are dealing with tests on 3 clients right now on which we worked on making the cart as similar to the website as possible and we have great results on all of them. Checkout the before and after for the above cart. Which one do you think is winning?

Well done Cross Selling

Well done cross selling will most likely decrease the conversion rate of a shopping cart. Yeah, you heard me right. However, well done cross selling will increase the average order value, therefore the revenue. Checkout the following charts and see how cross selling has impacted the sales of one of our clients.

What do I mean when I say well done cross selling? Check out the following implementations for 2 other clients of ours.

We will keep you posted with future developments, but till then I would appreciate if you would let us know what your testing ideas are.

During a research on shopping cart conversion rates I did the last couple of weeks, I found websites with 0,4% funnel conversion rates and others with completion rates up to 70%. I never expected to find such big discrepancies; no analysis can be made in such conditions so I started to look up  reasons for these discrepancies.

After talking to different software vendors about various issues their potential customers reported and after noticing different trends in multiple analytics data, I found the fugitive criminal guilty for many many abandons in shopping carts: Shopper Trust.

Shopper Trust Wanted. Reward Offered.

How to find it? Easy, or so they say. Check out the following clues.

1. Among Trust’s best friends there’s a guy named “Price”

Showing prices & discounts next to buy buttons

It’s important for your users to pay the “right” price for your products, but more important is to really know how much a product costs. You might say this is obvious (I for sure would have said that), but going from one website to another I found many where it was unclear how much a product costs.

It’s not mandatory to  have the price on the right or on the left of the screen. The important thing is that when the user says to himself “I wonder how much this software costs. I’d like to buy it”, he should get the answer before he gets to finish his sentence.

My 2 cents is to always have the price next to the buy button or link. This way you make sure that every time a user gets in the shopping cart he already knows the price of your product. Also, place it next to the product box, something very similar to the offline world where the user is used to always have the price next to the product he is buying.

To be honest more and more software vendors our company works with don’t track downloads and, what is more exciting, “downloaders”. So, I went to my favorites dev geeks in our team, Alex and Serban, and asked them to help me find out a really-really easy way on how to track downloads and “downloaders”.

This method is specially created for all those website where there is a download button which just starts the download and nothing else. Yes, we do recommend having “Thank You for Downloading” pages which are very easy to track (just place the standard Google Analytics tracking code on the pages), but for those of you who don’t intend to do that I’ve come out with this neat 4 step tutorial on how to do it.

Step 1: Adding some code

Just add the following code between <head> and </head> on all your pages from the website where the download can be initiated.

<script type=”text/javascript”> function setIframe() {var avIframe = document.getElementById(’av_iframe’).innerHTML = ‘<iframe src =”/software_download.html” style=”border:none;width:1px;height:1px;” marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ frameborder=”0″></iframe>’;} </script>

Most of you are already accustomed with URL address shortening services. You know, those websites which make your URLs short and ugly so you can post them on Twitter, Facebook or just send them to a friend. The thing is you never know where these links end up and how much traffic they drive. For me, working in web analytics, not knowing something like this is itching like hell, so I have decided to find a solution to it.

Tackling the problem

What I did is create a special GreaseMonkey script for Firefox (you need to have GreaseMonkey installed), which offers the possibility of adding Google Analytics variables in order to easily track all the users clicking on the short URL you are just about to generate. Here is how the the new http://is.gd homepage will look like after you install the script.

The other week, Brian Clifton wrote a very neat article on his well-known blog about tracking social networks by using filters. The data I got from the implementations he recommended in that article made me want to obtain even more “actionable data”.

So I went a little deeper into it and, after some tricks and implementations, I decided to share the findings with you. So here goes my second article for the series: 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about your visitors. If you missed the first one about visitors that lost their way, check it now.

This post tries to answer the following questions:

• What’s wrong with the data I already have?
• How to tweak it?
• How to use the new reports?
• What actions to take?… at least a couple of examples :)

One of the favorite’s expressions between us, analytics ninja wannabees, is “Actionable Data”. Yes, we like this phrase a lot and we use it every time we have the occasion. It gives meaning to our work and it’s a great hook to get CEOs, CTOs and marketing departments to listen to what we might have to say.

What is “Actionable Data” and how do you track it?

Unfortunately, the answer is not as easy as I would like it to be. With the help of Avinash Kaushik I got access the other week to the new Segmentation feature in Google Analytics (GA). I played with it a full weekend, doing advanced segments, but when I got to show it to my colleagues on Monday, all I was able to share were very neat tips and tricks. And I got the following remark from: “Wow, really cool… but how does it help us”?

So, this is what Actionable Data is for me: data that helps me improve my website. Before looking at data, I first ask myself: What do I need help with? Is the conversion number to small? Am I spending too much money on AdWords? Should I invite more bloggers to try our products and if yes, which ones?