As time went by and as I learnt more, and learnt quickly, I received more in-depth answers on Big.TOE but they were still vague; it was never defined to me in the simple terms of ‘Big.TOE is this’. But over time I built a picture of what Big.TOE is or – more to the point – what it is going to be.

Big.TOE is going to be the best use of the data from VITES. Specifically it’ll be a reporting tool.

So, recently, Big.TOE was kicked off by inviting most of the guys for a meeting to discuss the ideas and goals of Big.TOE and to push it into production, I raised my hand to be the ‘project sponsor’, and I was selected. As this is my first project it was suggested that I write a diary… so here we are. The diary will follow in weekly installments.

There’s not much we don’t know about web forms.

We’ve been designing forms on web sites since 1996 and were one of the first companies in the UK to utilise the form as the engine of the site in 1999. Since that time our approach has been widely adopted, copied and used as examples of best practice by some of the leading minds in this field.

Form best practices

Start by clearly defining the purpose of the form, many of these aims are pretty diverse to make sure you set a clear and SMART objective for each and every form. You are allowed to have a secondary objective but you must take care the ensure that the secondary objective a) doesn’t confuse or distract the visitor from the first objective and b) has it’s value clearly understood compared to the first to avoid selective reporting. Ensure your testing method would stand clinical scrutiny.

Secondly, you should set a performance target for the form, a fill or completion rate. This sets a bar by which you can measure it’s current and future performance

Thirdly, the form must be designed with the visitor/user in mind. You need to protect yourself from HiPPOs, at all costs.

Once you have agreed the objectives, targets and approach you can set about designing the form.

Keep in mind the following golden rules:

1. Short forms rock! It is well documented that visitors dislike long or complicated forms. Keep it short and simple and be wary asking for information that visitors might feel is either sensitive or intrusive.

2. Label the form clearly. Each input field requires the visitor to click the box and fill in details so make sure it is 100% clear what you are asking and use helper buttons, mouseovers and text to guide them through the input procedure. You must clearly mark a field as mandatory if required and it’s worth explaining why it is mandatory.

3. The layout of the form should dictate the design and that should be a naturally readable as possible and, if the form is a significant call-to-action, should stand out against the background of the page through the use of colour, reverse, font or size.

4. A large percentage of forms are filled-in incorrectly so you should always adopt a soft-error approach to dealing with errors. Soft-error management can double the fill rate of the form and needs careful consideration. Not all errors are equal; the visitor may have missed a mandatory field or typed an invalid email address or illegal telephone number / postcode. Each type of error needs dealing with uniquely and sympathetically – a massive great red box saying “Error, please fill the form in properly” is not very useful!

5. Always be testing. No matter how brilliant your first attempt at the form is you can always improve so go back and continually test every form you have – ideally you should be continually trying to improve key calls-to-action. Without continual testing you won’t get continual improvement and it’s an easy win. Be careful with your testing mechanisms, if you are using a third-party hosted service such as Google Analytics then you might find the result increasingly unreliable as privacy opt-ins become mandatory. Consider using a server-side, in-house, solution if possible.

6. Watch out for privacy. It’s fast becoming a hot topic so you should take care to have a simple and clear privacy policy that doesn’t detract from the form fill. As part of this you need to consider what tools you are using to track visitors; there is a strong movement in the US and mainland Europe to make most third-party reporting systems (such as Google Analytics) an option for visitors with the default position of “opted out”.

Magic stuff

There are a few great tricks, some of which I am sure you are using but it’s worth listing the standard list of winners/losers and red-herrings.

1. Lightweight wins, every time. The heavier the logical page is the worse it will convert – try to get you form-based pages under 50k in size but certainly no heavier than 150k.

2. Red buttons do work. Use them.

3. Always make the button text the nature of the call to action, never “submit”. Never put a “reset” button on the form.

4. Need lots of information? Break the forms down into multiple stages.

5. Pre-fill the forms; always remember what a visitor types into a form, never make them re-enter information they have already given you.

6. Make sure the “Thanks page” has further Calls-to-action on it and where possible send the visitor an email thanking them for their time and explain what happens next at the same time giving them further things to do via additional links.

7. Never ask “where did you hear about us”, you should be able to work this o

8. If you are going to validate form fields make sure you get it right and are not over-fussy with spaces, commas, capitals and numbers etc.

9. Spend some time understanding Choice Architecture to permit gentle coaxing of visitors in the right direction.

10. Remember the mobile world. Smartphone/iPads/tablets are becoming commonplace and these typically have very different input methods that can make traditional forms difficult to complete. As part of this…never use flash.

Finally, small improvements compounded over a period of time make for big improvements in conversion rates with little risk and low cost. Alternatively – huge changes tested continually will, if monitored properly,  generate quicker improvements and a huge pile of discarded ideas; but might be more expensive. Why not mix and match, going after small changes continually and then every now and again chucking in an odd on…why not try single box multiple entry?

We’ve just finished our financial year and, feck me, it’s been a busy old year. I’ll do a fuller post highlighting how the year went in more detail but the big thing we’ve seen this year is the explosive growth and (almost) 100% adoption of web site testing. From just 35% of our clients embracing testing in our last FY.

The growth has been so dramatic that we actually completed over 250 individual tests in May, June and July versus just 100 in the same period last year. So what is being tested and what’s working?

1. Page load speed is still an important factor. Landing pages, especially, benefit from slimming classes and whilst the need to have skinny 16k versions seems to be less critical than last year the target is still under 40k as you can expect to achieve twice the conversion versus a 120k page.

2. Relevancy is now a prerequisite. Dedicated landing pages for advertising terms out perform generic home pages by a factor of 2 and edge in front of deep-links by 25%. It’s worth double checking your traffic supplier or Adwords campaign to ensure you don’t have any old orphan campaigns that go to non-dedicated pages, far too many still slip through the net and this costs your conversion rate heavily.

3. Video is starting to make in-roads into certain areas and, critically, at certain times of the day and to certain audiences. In a group of personalised tests we found that certain groups of visitors (eg those that have generic hotmail, MSN or yahoo email addresses) respond far better to video-based pages than standard landing versions. Its not just video, the time to start using profiling pro-actively has arrived and start serving differing landing and content pages to distinct groups. Personalized targeting has shown a typical 10% lift in conversion over non-personalized content.

4. Numbers rock. Testing quantitative versus qualitative in copy is starting to show that using hard numbers work much better than general (soft) marketing messaging. Be mindful that the numbers you use have to be impressive in the context of the visitors needs.

The biggest lesson is the big picture here, continual testing shows continual improvement without the expected plateau that you would think occur. In fact the reverse is true, testing a little can be dangerous as you run the risk of testing items that are too small or too insignificant – think big, be brave and keep a close eye on the numbers so you can cut failed tests and rev-up the successful ones.

I expect our testing load to double in the next year. Bring it on

Thankfully, this is not the case. Much like the focus on “bounce rate” it all ended up being a huge Red Herring. It took a number of scientifically accurate tests to prove that the fold is not quite as critical as you might imagine. Don’t get me wrong, it can make a difference but, for gods sake, test it first as we found out this year with two big tests concerning what is and what isn’t “above the fold”. In both cases it made no difference so we can welcome back “long copy” that until recently has been consigned to the bin.

We all know what really matters is the customer journey and overall conversion and not whether all the content and actions are above the fold on the home page. Or, as an aside, does the bounce rate have special meaning.

How does A/B testing work?

The idea is to change some part of your website and see if the new version does better than the old.  A good place to start is just changing words – maybe a headline. You call the existing version “A” and the new version “B“.

You already know that the page is converting at 2% so you could just try the new headline for a few days and check the new conversion rate.

Trouble with this method is that conversion rates change from day to day. You can guess at some of the reasons: weather, day-of-week, competitor activity.  So you may be trying a bad headline on a good day or a great headline on a lousy day – and make the wrong decision about the headline.

Focus on what has changed

We can remove these other factors from the test. We show A and B at the same time. Software randomly decides if a new visitor to the site is going to see A or see B, then tracks visitors through to conversion and measures if A or B is doing better.

• If it’s raining – people will see both A and B.
• If it’s sunny – people will see both A and B.
• If a rival starts a price war – people will see both A and B.

You have removed the other factors.

Is it significant?

We use a statistical test to check that results are significant – and not just random effects. Sometimes improvements are small, but still worth having. Several 2-3% increases start to add up.

Is it just Connected doing split testing?

Amazon, Zappos, Google, eBay, EasyJet – all the big names use A/B split testing. Join the big boys – with our help.

So in many ways it’s been a rear-guard action as we’ve had to fight against the client’s, co-supplier’s and consultant’s wishes to drive home the philosophy of continual testing and letting the masses decide which page, landing zone, micro-site, call-to-action and design is better.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a hard slog and at a number of points we were on the point of giving up but after 2 months showing the results of real numbers and metrics they’re sold and quite rightly they should after seeing a dramatic upswing in conversion rate.

We’re in the final throes of putting together a case study on this client and I hope it will be ready sometime in April so if you want to reserve a PDF version of the case study now then drop me an email and I’ll make sure you get one of the first batch.

This will be the first time we’ve openly shared so much information about how we work and we’ll be showing actual test results with annotated screenshots. The case study is part of our 64Monkeys projects that was kicked-off in 2007 as an internal knowledge base holding the planning and results behind every test we’ve carried out (around 4,500 so far). We’re planning an alpha roll-out of 64Monkeys later this year to openly share and collaborate with our clients and encourage a great deal of cross-fertilisation.

These are all questions typically running around marketing departments at the moment and the stock answer is to “get a new one designed” on the basis that it must be better than the old one as it’s newer and we’ve learned things (have we?) about the current versions of the landing pages.

Trial and error economics

Don’t guess, don’t risk the return on the heavy-lifters. Your current series of pages act as a ‘banker’ – put simply the new stuff has to race the best of the best you have already. When testing the new pages against the current bankers use a reliable testing method (such as the null hypothesis) that gives results you can be confident in. If you can be confident in the results then you can queue up hundreds of ideas to be tested and leave the testing harness to do the hard work or evaluating the changes.

The risk is low because:

• Pages that perform a lot worse than the banker will show up as failing very quickly and can be removed from the test quickly.
• Pages that perform a lot better than the banker will show up as succeeding very quickly and can replace the banker quickly.
• Pages that perform similarly will take a lot longer to determine their value but as they are not hurting (or helping) the conversion rate there is no loss associated with leaving them in test except the loss of the opportunity to run another test.
• Testing small changes can help with specific learning. For example, the data-entry form might perform better with a solid blue background versus white. This is real learning and can be applied (after testing) across other landing pages.

In fact, taken as a continuous process (Kaizen) optimising the landing pages can be the easiest and fastest way to continually improve a site, although not very glamorous for a marketing department.

About VITES™ as a testing tool

Split testing using the null hypothesis is built-into the core of VITES™ and offers a fast, reliable and repeatable test harness. Testing can be done via profile, traffic type, campaign or any other superset of visitor data (postcode range, for example) and is not limited to A/B testing with support for 26 concurrent tests running in each profile.  Traffic can be split in any range, typically the fastest results are achieved using a 50:50 ratio in an A/B test but 80:20 tests are commonly used when clients are nervous about radical changes to high net-worth landing pages.

The art of improvement is simple; make a change and then test it. If it’s better then use the latest version as the best and then cycle round again. The compounding effect of making lots of small improvements gives a number of key benefits:

• Continual improvement drives the performance up, relentlessly
• A frequent change culture encourages the testing of lots of ideas, sometimes the daftest or smallest of ideas have a major impact on performance
• Reduction of risk, a poorer performing idea is quickly and efficiently scrapped
• Much wider pool of thinking, more ideas from more people adheres closely to the concept of “the wisdom of the masses”
• Avoids the “Highest paid persons opinion” (HiPPO) quandary where decisions are made at the wrong level by the wrong people
• Compounding small improvement generates a huge improvement over time
• Real learning is possible and this helps the feedback loop for the next test
• No idea is right or wrong – it simply generates learning

The downside of kaizen in the digital world is that most web-site environments are simply not built to allow the kind of rapid change, test function that is required to get the most from this approach. VITES™ at it’s core is built around this philosophy.

Trial and error culture

Connected adopt a Kaizen approach to ongoing development and conversion rates where staying agile and making lots and lots of small changes – each time testing them to measure success – and then moving on again. Connected offer a number of services to help make this happen:-

• Fixed Kaizen contracts. A fixed number of tests or hours in a given period with a planned target to reach.
• A/B testing suites. Utilising the VITES™ platform to provide accurate, reliable A/B testing.
• Profile/persona-based testing. VITES™ supports unlimited profiles and profiles types, each can be tested independently or raced against a “banker”.
• Micro-site build & development. Avoiding the need to completely re-develop a client web-site and provide much of the improvement via a micro or landing-page site.
• Business Intelligence reporting. VITES™ Passport ™ provides a huge mine of data that can be accessed to provide unique learning. Provided as a service or as an API.
• Landing-page heavy lifting projects. The key first-wins for most commercial traffic sites, provided as a service, turnkey or consultancy.
• Performance contracts. Fixed target-based contract rewarded around specific goals and milestones.

Connected provide these services either standalone or linked with existing build-and-manage contracts.

What results can you expect?

Depending on the start point most clients can expect to achieve a doubling of conversion rates during the first year. The law of diminishing returns can apply and often the major advances are made in the early part of the project. Pushing down the “long tail” still has great value and the ongoing refining of the solution frequently uncovers surprises and big jumps on online conversion rates.

Keen to find out more?

Thinking of entering this world? Talk to Liam, Nick or Martin on 0845 051 4228 and he’ll sit down with you and go through the various options available and how to best approach improving your digital offering.

This is a classic sales process for many organisations, often referred to as the sales funnel, yet this methodology on the web is not widely available. Below I will provide a brief overview of a client that uses this technology to stunning effect.

Laser eye surgery company

Founded over 10 years ago on a traditional clinical sales model (information -> consultation -> sale -> treatment) the emergence of the Internet offered this client a unique opportunity to map their current sales process onto an online model. At the start of this project in 2002 less than 20% of treated individuals ever touched their web presence. In 2009, nearly 90% of treated patients went through some element of the various web assets – they have, in effect, transformed into a dot com business in just a few years with spectacular results.

The challenges

Mapping a sales transition curve onto an online system is relatively simple to do with the right platform and this was achieved quite quickly and easily. Using the VITES™ platform a number of sales steps were created; first-timers, information gatherers, thinkers, consultation bookers, consultation attenders and treated patients. At all stages in the journey help and assistance is made available. Testimonials re-enforcing and evangelising the positives in the process are posted.

To grow the business and generate sustainable sales, every person in the process has to go through (almost) every stage and this process is not always linear, some steps are missed out and some are clumped together depending on the needs, fears, issues and financial standing of the customer.

At each stage there are various challenges faced by the company and the customer. Here is a summary of the stages and the challenges:

First timers – Stage A

Customer : Who is this company? Are they right for me? What’s involved in surgery? How much? Will it hurt?

Company : Quick engagement, make sure they stay or leave a method for re-engaging (email, address)

Information gatherers – Stage B

Customer : Where is the information I need? How much will it hurt? How can I afford it?

Company : Getting the “this is simple & painless” message across. We can make this affordable. We are the best.

Thinking about it – Stage C

Customer : Really not sure about surgery? Will I go blind if it goes wrong? It’s expensive.

Company : Gotta keep ‘em warm, if they disengage we stand a good chance of losing them. It really *is* safe.

Consultation bookers – Stage D

Customer : Can I see someone near me? Does it cost? Will it hurt? Credit or cash purchase?

Company : Consultations are free, no obligation, no sales pressure. We are the best!

Consultation attenders – Stage E

Customer : Hmm, I’m suitable now – should I go ahead? What happens if I go blind? What about post-op complications?

Company : Gotta get them to buy, this is the most expensive stage to lose ‘em, momentum is the game

Treated patients – Stage F

Customer : Wow, it’s fab – who else can I tell this about, can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner, it didn’t hurt

Company : Lets get these guys talking to the wide world and also to the people in the early stages

There are clear themes that run throughout most of the process, fear and cost for example, but at each stage there are subtly different issues, challenges and therefore different messages, different calls to action and different ways of dealing with the visitor.

The solution

Using the VITES™ Journey Platform, rules define that each visitor is tagged at each stage and “dropped” into a profile that fits the stage that they are at. In each profile there are different ways of dealing with the various challenges and these are served up as custom content based on what is known about the visitor. Additionally, there is external learning that can be transferred into the system; for example an incoming first-time visitor who has typed “laser eye treatment” into Google has a higher preponderance to move faster through the sales cycle than, say, an individual who has responded to a “win FREE laser eye surgery” banner on Hotmail.

A bespoke forum comprising FAQ’s and posts is available to the visitor. It is important that platform technology and the quick and easy availability of “help” work together to enable the journey to continue.

Below are some rule examples:

• If you are a stage A and have typed “laser eye treatment” into Google then show a “Consultation request” form
• If you are a stage A from a (filler) banner campaign based around “Win FREE” then show a “Win FREE form”
• If you are a stage A person and leave the site then flood the visitors banner network with “Win FREE” banners to get you back.
• If you have been on stage B for more than 30 days show an “Interest Free Offer”
• If you have just become a stage B then show a “Consult Booking” option
• If you are at stage C then show testimonials from people like you, treated near you and show forum posts from stage F people (how wonderful it is)
• If you are stage D then show special offers during week 6 to 9

The rules are not complex but there are a great deal of them and with around 3,500 entrance points to the site used by approximately 1,000,000 visitors per month the automated system simply chugs away delivering the right content at the right time. To further expand the model, to say “show a consult booking” option is wider than just online; it includes the use of personalised email and also communicates this information to (and from) the call-centre to ensure that the sales message is consistent across all communication platforms.

See it working?

The average time from first-arrival to sale is around 90 days and with the VITES™ platform being self learning and with many of the rules making quite subtle changes it’s actually very difficult to see the process in action – which is good. You don’t want the visitor to have a “jolting” experience every time he or she returns to the site. The very nature of VITES™ is that it is subtle.

Trial and error economics

The very nature of the platform encourages testing, seeking improvements in all the stages. A few percentage point improvements in the stages generates huge compounded gains. For example, the overall conversion rate from visitor to client has doubled over the last 3 years and the cost per sale has dropped 80% over that time period whilst the time-to-close has fallen by over a third. These are all substantial gains and one of the reasons that the work done on this client is often quoted as real “best practice” across the world and used by some of the top Internet gurus as the basis for workshops, seminars and events.