wangarific

I’ve been writing a lot about optimization, be it improving click through rate or site responsiveness, lately because it’s something I’ve been focused on the last few weeks. Getting more traffic is harder than optimizing your site so that it offers the best information to the traffic you’re already getting. Boosting your conversion rate by making your content more appealing is a lot easier than trying to get more eyeballs!

So in some of my posts I’ve been sharing what has worked well for me and there may be a temptation for you to blindly implement them on your site – I advise against it. In fact, I advise taking any results anywhere and blindly implementing them without any data because you don’t know how that change will perform on your site.

Let’s take a prime example -Amazon.com. It’s a well known fact that Amazon.com tests almost every aspect of their site. With their traffic and their optimization brains, it’s obvious that they are probably very close to “perfect” when it comes to the buying experience. The start of that buying experience is the product page and the pivotal action on that page is clicking that Add to Shopping Cart button.

The orange “Add to Shopping Cart” button with the navy blue text is the highest converting button for their layout and that’s after years of optimization and study. Does that mean you should apply it on your site blindly?

Nope. To test this theory, I tried a few buttons on Bargaineering, including their orange button, and my results were different. I had four options, one text link and three buttons. Each button had the same text, were placed in the same place, and I simply calculated CTR (I did this study long ago and so I don’t have more data than this to offer):

• Text – 1.71%
• Green Button – 6.44%
• Blue Button – 5.08%
• Orange Button – 3.38%

The Amazon orange button performed better than the text but worse than both green and blue. When I had to guess, my guess was that the predominately blue layout of Bargaineering made the green and blue buttons more appealing. In a head to head test, green outperformed blue.

The one color I didn’t test was Red, because the general consensus advice was that red was a “stop” color. It catches the eye but it tells people to implicitly “stop.” However, based on my own advice, I should try red to see if it performs better.

There are two lessons out of this – always test ideas for your site with real data and always use a button.