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The ecommerce software magento comes with Google Optimiser built into a couple of areas.  These are categories and product listings.  This is great but the most important experiments with Google Optimiser should be done on the front page, but this involves coding into the actual template.

If you do not know Google Optimiser allows you to split test (or multivariate test) your website so that you show one user one thing and another user something else.  You then track to conversion and see which ‘thing’ gets the most conversions.  This is classic direct response marketing and one of the reasons why I love Google Optimiser.

So what are the most powerful experiments you can do using the ‘in box’ functionality of Magento.

Category Experiments

Google Optimiser in Magento allows you to test the html that goes above the product thumbnails on your category pages.  However I have found in all my experiments that if I put anything above the products, be it text, images, testimonials WHATEVER it reduces conversion.  This hampers your ability to put text for the search engines here and so if you need text for the search engines I would suggest putting it at the bottom of the page.  Conversion is king in my book.

So if you have text at the top of your category pages, the experiment you should run is to remove it completely and see if this raises converison.

Product Experiments

With products you have a bit more flexibility in that you can test, the product image, the product title, the short product description, the long product description.

The biggest impact is going to be the image of the product and I have found that a ‘hero’ shot out performs anything else.  A hero shot is a picture of the product being used as apposed to just a picture of the product.  So if you sell suits it would be a picture of a dashing man wearing the suit, as apposed to the suit on a manaquin.  So try testing ‘hero’ shot on your top products and if it helps conversion consider rolling out to your whole range.

Next from my experiments I have found that the product description that the user sees straight after the product title is important.  Here you have to know about copy writing to try and insert some ‘triggers’ to make people buy.  I have tried everything!  I have found that putting testimonials here is a bad idea and that they should go below.  However adding in the normal ‘copy triggers’ does help and these are

- Scarcity – mentioning the product is limited edition or that it will only be available for a short period of time.

- Authority – mentioning a highly rated third parties endorsement of the product.

These two have helped conversion when I have tested.

Then you are left with tests on the product name and the other description.  Initial testing showed that putting the brand name in the product title defnitely helped but this really depended on the client I tried it with, so try testing.  I am talking about a site that sells only its own brand and not a site that sells many brands where you would need to put the brand in the title.  However I would only move onto this ‘product name’ test once you have exhausted the image and the description choices.

You should limit your tests to just the image at first as most sites do not have the traffic or sales to get meaningful results from many tests at once.  In fact you could wait months before you got a confident results.  Therefore I always recommended doing these tests on your most popular product and then rolling out benefits to other products.  This way you can move the most quickly.

What tests have you tried? Please comment I promise to respond to all comments!

Thanks

Mark Hammersley