Website Optimisation is a fantastic process of increasing the value of visitors to your website.  For ecommerce sites, this essentially means increasing the likelihood of making a sale and/or the value of each sale.  For other websites, the goal may be different – increasing the likelihood a visitor will watch your video.

This is a very real, robust process regardless of how well your website already performs.  Amazon is the site it is today through this very process, which has seen it evolve slowly over years from a very basic ecommerce bookstore to a mega online retailer.  Google is always testing changes to all their products including the search page.  This alone should be enough to convince you it is worth investing in, but just in case, this document is an in-depth look at our process.

Before you start, you should answer these two questions:

• What goal do I want my visitor to complete?
• Which pages are involved in the process of a visitor completing this goal?

With the answers in mind, you should be able to name a few pages that are worth running tests on.  However, we don’t yet know what changes to test, or whether the test will be viable.

We use a range of tools to help us to choose the right pages and the right tests to run.

Google Analytics

This is great for seeing traffic to a page and goals completed.  You will first need to use the Content section and look at the Top Content.  This will show you the pages with highest overall traffic going through them.  The higher volume of traffic running through a page, the more impact any improvement will have on your objective.

This table shows that the Home Page and Category 1 Page have high volumes of traffic, so if they are on our path to conversion, then an improvement would have a large impact.  Also, the Home Page has a high exit rate compared with other pages, so it is slightly problematic (although this is often characteristic of a home page).

We have highlighted the Basket and Checkout as important even though they have few statistical problems, so they are on the test list.  Other potentially good test pages are those with high bounce or exit rates. If you choose a page with a high bounce rate, you should check the volume of traffic landing on the page is high enough for the stat to be significant – use the Top Landing Pages tab.

Next it is important to check how many goals are completed by visitors going through your chosen test page.  This will allow you to estimate how long your test will need to run for.  Ideally, you should be aiming for 200 goals completed per variation you create:

This table shows estimates of how many variations you should use, depending on the page you are testing and the length of the test you are running.  If the page has few goals completed, you will be forced into a longer test.

To work out goals per month, you need to use segmentation in Google Analytics.  Create a segment that matches exactly page=example_page.  Then go to the goals section to see how many goals were completed in a month.

If you literally have less than 100 goals per month on your highest converting page, then you can choose a different goal to optimise for. This is not ideal, but if you choose a goal high in the conversion path, you should improve conversions. For example, an ecommerce site may use the first checkout page as the goal, since more visitors will reach this point than the actual completed sale.  This is not perfect, but if you can drive more visitors to the first page of the checkout, then it is likely you will make more sales.

We’ve explored how you choose the right pages to test on in Part 1. In Part 2, we will explore how you understand your visitors so you can create the tests that are likely to produce great results.