Where do you even start? What do you test? What can you test? What are we even testing? You have a website and it’s a complete mess, we’re going through the IDEA process.
Identify Metrics You Can Measure
Every website has different test they can run, you’re going to want to identify these metrics. Ask yourself what you want from your website, what are you looking to gain.
There’s a variety of different metrics you can test start with:
Traffic
Clicks
Views
Bounce Rates
Average Time on Page
Just to name a few and those are some good starting points to look at for a new website.
If you don’t know where to find these metrics there’s also a variety of different places you can retrieve this information:
Internal Data
Website Analytics such as Adobe Analytics
Internal Site Searches
Heatmaps
Or even data from you Sales Team and engineering
Market Research
Google Dataset Search
Google Trends Google
Ad’s Keyword Planner
Traditional Marketing Initiatives
Qr Codes
Coupon Codes
And Unique Landing Pages
Define the SMART goals for your test
Like I said, what do you want out of all of this, are you looking for more clicks more traffic, do you want people to know to know your company. There’s so many different questions you can ask yourself but with a SMART goal it’ll help condense and pinpoint focus on one thing.
S-Specific
Pick one thing you want to focus on, like traffic what’s your traffic rate at right now? How much do you ideally want it at?
M-Measurable
How do we want to measure this by? Always keep in mind that you want to track progress to get better results. Looking at traffic are we only looking at people that come to the website or are we adding factors such as bounce back rates or purchase rate.
A-Achievable/Attainable
Going back to your specific, you set a specific number you want to increase by or improve, is that a reasonable number?
R-Realistic
Is this relevant for what you want for your website, if you’re a selling website will an increase in traffic help selling?
T-Timely
When do you want to achieve all of this by?
Experiment
From your SMART goal, now we can experiment. Start with A/B testing create a unique link for customers to go and from there track for example their traffic, how long do they stay on the site or not, do they buy anything. You can track traffic through purchase rate and traffic through bounce back rate, even with how many clicks, did they explore the site. From the Experiment you can go back and see what was appealing to customers versus what wasn’t.
Analyze the Results
We’re almost done, after the experiment you’re of course going to go over the results, are those the numbers you want to see, is there something missing from your website that could help increase these number? if it’s not, so what there’s plenty of time to retest and improve. There’s no wrongs and no failing.
