This interview with Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences is part of the Convirza Webinar Series. A post containing the details of Brian’s entire presentation is available here. The following is the Q&A portion of the interview.
McKay: First question we have is one that’s humorous, but maybe, you hear some, Brian. Are you wearing the white lab coat right now?
Brian: I am. In fact, I tweeted a picture of me in the lab coat with the silver conversion microphone. So my handle is @bmassey and if you want to see a picture of me in the coat, there is the proof.
McKay: Great, very good. And then we’ve got a couple of other real questions here I actually want to ask you. The first one is, do you have a recommended time that you should split test a landing page? Is there a recommended time or maybe a traffic volume before you can really arrive at a conclusion as to what works and what doesn’t?
Brian: Yeah, we do use a couple of rules of thumb. We like to see a minimum of 100 conversions per treatment. So let’s say you have one page that has a pink button on it and one page that has a red button on it. We want 100 conversions on that page and 100 conversions on the other page before we feel like we have statistical significance. Now, there is a copy out here.
If you’re dealing in a situation where you aren’t able to generate a lot of traffic to a page, you have red button and pink button pages, and one has gone from a minimum of seven days. You want to make sure that you’re collecting an entire week’s worth of data. If you have spikes at the end of the month, go ahead and let it run for a full month. And one is like 200% ahead of the other one. You can assume because it’s such a large difference that that page would be your new control. However, if you’ve let it run for that period of time and the difference between the two is only 10% or 20% because there is low traffic. So you can’t really rely on it.
So if you’re in a low traffic situation and you can generate a page that has a very large benefit larger than the error range would be, and again, it’s going to be 100%, 200% increase, you can go ahead and accept that page provided that you let it run at least seven days or the 30 days if you have a monthly cycle.
McKay: That’s great. And then sort of a follow-up to that, what third-party tools or providers do you like in terms of tracking conversions and maybe AB testing, and things like that. Are there any tools you could recommend to us that would be useful?
Brian: Yeah, I think it depends on your situation. So if you have an enterprise solution and you are dealing with a very high volume website, the test and target tool from Adobe is awesome for split testing. That gives you a lot of capability for testing segments and things like that.
If you’re going to invest in a tool like that, though, you need someone with a great deal of time to devote to it, to justify it. For those smaller businesses, if you want to test on your site, for instance, you’re in eCommerce site and you want to be testing your category pages or your product pages, we use Convert.com. It’s your convert insights, which you’ll find at Convert.com. We use Visual Website Optimizer and so those allow you to test on your site.
Now, if you want to do a test, for instance, you’re doing ads and you want to drive them to landing pages, and you don’t want to deal with your IT folks, I can certainly recommend services like Unbounce.com which allows you just to generate landing pages, and then create copies of that so you can change one or two things, and then it will report on who’s . . .They’ll help split the traffic for you, and report on which of those pages is converting the best. The other one that we use is Lander App.
McKay: Great, that’s good information. I would recommend, like as you said, I think those are great tools as well.
Brian: Yeah, and all of these, by the way, are in the conversion . . . They are all in the conversion labs. If you go to www.MyConversionLab.com, we list them all. And the ones we like, we provide some opinion on and what we like about it.
McKay: Great, and then two more questions and we’ll be done. First question is, you mentioned in terms of tracking conversions be via the phone as well. And you mentioned you found some interesting things that we’ve, of course, done a lot of testing with that. Can you, maybe, summarize an interesting finding you had when you were doing some testing in terms of phone conversions?
Brian: Yeah, so one of the things that we wanted to be able to track was what regions were interesting. So this particular client is a directory of service providers and they want to understand what parts of the world people are calling from. And what we’re looking for is just a map onto population areas so, obviously, we’re more likely to get people from Los Angeles, and New York, and Texas because those are the higher population states. But understanding the outliers, Arkansas.
For some reason, Arkansas seems to be calling a lot. What’s the opportunity there? It’s their service provider that’s doing a lot of advertising there. The other thing we’re very interested in is what people are looking for. So what keywords can we tie to successful calls? And when we know that, we know what to big more on we can get more qualified traffic to the site. The other thing we’re very interested in is which pages. So are people coming from the directory pages where there’s a listing of all of the directories near there?
The search results page is really what it’s called, so if I type in a zip code, I will get a listing of all of the service providers near me. Is that getting people to call or are they clicking through and calling from the product page? So the call tracking really assigns a unique phone number to the visitors and then it allows us to store some information about that person’s visit along with that phone number so that we could start to trace pages, keywords to successful calls and make much better decisions about where we need to be optimizing.
McKay: Very good, great information. And then finally, you made a very generous offer when people signed up for the webinar. They entered in to receive a copy of your book for free. Do you want to email the winner out as soon as this webinar is over? How do you want to take care of that, Brian?
Brian: That’s a good question. Yes, the sooner the better, I think. And yes, I think the sooner the better.
McKay: Great, so we’ll get an email out that notifies the winner of Brian’s book. In addition, you’ll be receiving an email tomorrow that will have information about how you can access these slides and how you can access the webinar. So with that, I want to thank Brian again. Brian, any last words before we conclude?
Brian: My last words is that . . . I talk about a lot of unexpected things here, talk about a lot of tools and talk a lot about other things. The bottom line is that this stuff’s fun. This stuff is fun to do so as you start to get comfortable with these tools and learn some things about your visitors, you’re going to have a lot more fun as a marketer or a business owner. So if nothing else, start checking this stuff out so you can have more fun.
McKay: Great, good advice. Brian, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it. And everyone, thank you for coming. We appreciate your time and your questions and your interest. So please sign up for next week’s webinar and in the interim, have a wonderful week and thank you Brian, once again.
