Nick James

Little Changes Vs Big Results

Anyone trying to improve their web site's performance will hear the advice to test.

Anyone trying to improve their web site's performance will hear the advice to test, test, test.

There is very good reason for it because even small changes can have a significant impact on your web site's profitability. This was dramatically demonstrated at a recent seminar I attended.

The speakers at this seminar included some of the top traffic sites online. Some had millions of visitors to their site every week. This gave them the luxury of being able to constantly test out small changes to their site. Within a short period of time, the results are pretty clear whether the "before" or "after" was working better.

One speaker made a comment in passing that I found interesting. As the President of AmericanGreetings.com, Josef Mandelbaum gave an incredibly insightful peek behind this hugely successful subscription site. With over 2.1 million subscribers to date, you can bet that they are tweaking their site continously to get every ounce of performance out of it.

Josef had mentioned that at one point they recently decided to test the color of their "Join now" buttons on their site. There was no difference other than the color of the button.

He mentioned that they were surprised to find one color out performed another by 15%.

15%! Start doing the math with the numbers of visitors that they receive. Its obvious that that was a pretty valuable discovery.

Change Is Good

When was the last time that you tried changing and tracking the results of your changes?

Subscriber who have been with the Small Business Web Site are likely to see different changes I have implemented over time. Some of them are more obvious than others. Sometimes the changes stay (because they are working) while other times they may revert back or change to something else.

The point is that change is good. Whether you do better or worse, you learn from seeing what the results were.

How would you like a minor change to increase your profits by 15%? That is certainly a change for the better. Now imagine compiling small changes for the better one after another, after another.

Is It Worth It?

What happens then? You have a site that is converting phenomenally well.

You only have to look at Americangreetings.com for proof of that. As they constantly change and test, they have worked up their conversion rate to an incredible rate.

They convert 5.86% of their visitors into customers. That is an incredible statistic. Can you imagine converting almost 6 out every 100 people who visit your site into customers?

When was the last time you tested some changes on your site?

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