1장
Beyond Best Practices: The Science of Conversion Optimization
Have you ever wondered why some websites convert visitors into customers effortlessly while others struggle despite beautiful designs? Chris Goward's groundbreaking book "You Should Test That!" answers this question by challenging conventional wisdom about what makes websites effective. As founder of WiderFunnel, Goward has pioneered conversion optimization techniques used by giants like Google, Electronic Arts, and SAP. The book has become required reading in digital marketing circles, with industry leaders praising its practical approach to blending art and science.
What makes this book particularly valuable is its rejection of opinion-based design in favor of data-driven decision making. While most marketing books offer rigid best practices, Goward provides something more valuable: a systematic framework for discovering what actually works for your specific audience. This approach has revolutionized how companies approach their digital presence, with some clients reporting conversion improvements exceeding 100%. Whether you're managing a Fortune 500 website or a small business landing page, the principles in this book offer a roadmap to dramatically better results without increasing your marketing budget.
2장
The Conversion Crisis: Why Your Website Is Underperforming
Your website is likely the most crucial touchpoint in your business, yet it's almost certainly underperforming. Even industry leaders like Google, Facebook, and Amazon continuously test and refine their sites because they understand a fundamental truth: all websites can be improved.
Consider this sobering reality: most visitors leave websites without taking desired actions, effectively wasting marketing budgets. This happens partly because of the "halo effect" where website performance influences perception of product quality. Ironically, companies promoting "easy" products often have complicated websites that contradict their value proposition. Take BlackBerry's website as an example-a company promoting speed while delivering a slow-loading experience.
The design process typically goes wrong from the start. Clients select competitor websites they like without knowing their performance metrics, while design agencies prioritize client happiness and creative awards over revenue improvement. Both parties rarely establish proper business goals before beginning website projects. Designs become constrained by technical limitations rather than focused on lead generation and sales goals.
"Best practices" compound the problem by creating an "average" approach that perpetuates poor-performing elements. Most websites are designed by copying competitors, with clients deferring to agency opinions without questioning their assumptions. Instead of relying on opinions, websites should communicate unique value propositions tailored to specific business goals and target audiences.
Decision-making approaches further impact website effectiveness. The HiPPO method (deferring to the Highest-Paid Person's Opinion) and the Black Turtleneck method (unquestioned pronouncements from supposed experts) lead to subjective, untested designs. The Customer Tested method-using scientific hypothesis testing to find optimized solutions-consistently produces superior results.
Complete website redesigns represent another major risk. They're expensive, often reduce conversion rates and revenue, confuse valuable repeat customers, inadvertently introduce new conversion problems, and waste resources when design wasn't the core issue. Even when redesigns improve results, it's impossible to identify which specific changes helped or hurt performance among thousands of modifications.
Instead, conversion-rate optimization offers a more effective approach: increasing revenue without additional advertising costs. Mathematical examples show how improving landing page conversion rates reduces cost per conversion, while increasing click-through rates simply drives more traffic at the same conversion cost. The financial impact can be substantial-even modest percentage increases yield significant returns.
3장
The Science Behind Conversion Optimization
Conversion optimization exists at the intersection of persuasion marketing (creating motivation through clear communication), experience design (facilitating seamless action completion), and the scientific method (testing hypotheses through rigorous processes). It goes beyond usability testing, surveys, and click heatmap tracking, which are merely methods for developing hypotheses that must be tested.
Understanding your audience is critical for creating products and messages that resonate. While traditional target markets (based on demographic data) and personas (detailed fictional representations of customers) each have advantages, finding balance is key-using available data without becoming bogged down in overly detailed personas.
When setting conversion goals, prioritize revenue-producing actions over micro-conversions. While tracking micro-conversions (steps toward full conversion) can speed up experiments due to higher volume, this approach risks misleading results. A software company example demonstrated how different micro-conversion goals (download page visits, form views, or completed conversions) led to selecting entirely different "winning" variations in A/B tests.
Conversion optimization works best as an ongoing process rather than a one-time project. Just as life evolves through experimentation, businesses can consciously run experiments to stay competitive. Companies that view optimization as a one-time project miss valuable learning opportunities, while those committed to ongoing experimentation achieve compounding results.
The seven-step conversion-testing process includes: LIFT Analysis, Hypothesis Creation, Funnel Experiment Map, Graphic Design and Copy, Technical Setup, Data Collection, and Results Analysis. This systematic approach ensures tests are driven by marketing hypotheses rather than aesthetics, with each step building on insights from previous experiments in a continuous improvement cycle.
4장
Prioritizing Testing Opportunities with the PIE Framework
With limited resources and traffic volume, prioritizing which pages to test becomes crucial for effective conversion optimization. The PIE framework provides three criteria for prioritizing testing opportunities: Potential (how much improvement can be made), Importance (how valuable is the traffic), and Ease (how complicated implementation will be).
Contrary to common assumption, the home page may not deserve the most attention. Analyzing entrance data at the page-template level often reveals more important opportunities. In a jewelry e-commerce example, product detail pages collectively received twice as many entrances as the home page. Starting optimization on pages other than the home page helps avoid political barriers and build credibility with test results before approaching the organization's "sacred cow."
Finding problematic pages requires both analytics data and qualitative judgment. High-exit pages with significant traffic volume can be identified by filtering analytics reports, while funnel drop-off rates reveal optimization opportunities. For lead generation sites, the contact form page is especially important to optimize, as visitors who reach it are "hot leads" but may still abandon at high rates.
Qualitative data collection helps identify problem areas, provides context for how prospects view products, and generates testing hypotheses. Effective methods include usability testing (with as few as 3-5 participants), on-site surveys, customer email surveys, eye tracking, and click tracking. Each method reveals different aspects of visitor behavior and perception.
When prioritizing testing opportunities, consider the cost of acquiring visitors to each page. Between two pages with similar traffic and conversion problems, the one with higher-cost traffic will deliver better ROI from optimization efforts. Paid search traffic, particularly Google AdWords, often represents the highest-cost segment and should be prioritized.
Implementation difficulty, including both technical complexity and organizational barriers, is the final prioritization factor. More complex implementations include site-wide elements, alternative templates, dynamic content, CMS-controlled pages, alternative user flows, complex forms, server-side validation, phone tracking, multi-goal tracking, and multi-language support. However, these technically challenging tests often deliver the greatest rewards.
After evaluating test opportunities by importance, potential for improvement, and ease of implementation, use a weighting table to make decisions when priorities aren't immediately obvious. Rate each potential test page on a 1-5 scale across these three factors, then sum them for a priority rating.
5장
The LIFT Model: A Framework for Creating Powerful Hypotheses
The conversion expert's job is finding data-driven insights to dramatically improve business results by identifying marketing communication problems and developing solution hypotheses. Having a structured process for hypothesis development is more valuable than any one-time tips or best practices, which often fail without proper context.
Testing is essential because even experienced optimizers can't always predict which variations will win. The most valuable test results often contradict commonly accepted best practices. While people constantly seek conversion tips, there are no universal recommendations that work across all websites-design changes that help one site may harm another.
The Landing page Influence Function for Tests (LIFT) Model provides a framework for improving marketing communication and conversion. It identifies six conversion factors: Value Proposition forms the foundation, while Relevance, Clarity, and Urgency drive conversion, and Anxiety and Distraction inhibit it.
Your value proposition represents the complete set of perceived benefits and costs in the prospect's mind when considering your call to action. When perceived benefits outweigh costs, prospects become motivated to act. The strength of your value proposition determines your potential for conversion improvement-pages with weak value communication but strong underlying value have greater "conversion-rate elasticity" and should be prioritized for testing.
Relevance addresses whether the page matches what visitors expected to see. Research shows people follow "information scent" when searching, using pattern-matching rather than deep evaluation. To maintain interest, maximize this scent trail by ensuring your page uses words, images, colors, and layouts consistent with the incoming link and visitor expectations.
Clarity examines whether the page clearly communicates its value proposition and call to action. This factor encompasses both content clarity (ensuring images and text combine for quick comprehension) and design clarity. The best designers know how to use design to promote content rather than drawing attention to the design itself.
Anxiety represents any uncertainty in the visitor's mind about completing the conversion action. It's a function of built credibility and required trust. Strong brands with established credibility can ask for more trust than unknown entities. The balance between trust required and credibility established determines the anxiety level that might prevent conversion.
Distraction includes anything on the page that redirects attention from the primary message and call to action. Research in behavioral economics shows that more choice often overwhelms people and reduces conversion rates. Dan Ariely's jam study demonstrated that while more options (24 vs. 6) attracted more initial interest (60% vs. 40% of shoppers), fewer options resulted in significantly higher purchase rates (30% vs. 3%).
Urgency has two components: internal and external. Internal urgency comes from the visitor's mindset upon arrival, while external urgency can be influenced through limited-time offers, seasonal reminders, and copywriting tone. When internal urgency is low, there's greater opportunity to improve conversion rates through design and content changes.
The conversion process can be visualized as filling a jar with motivational marbles. Each visitor has a conversion tipping point where enough positive factors will trigger conversion, while negative factors create holes that let marbles escape. The marketer's job is to fill the visitor's jar with positive factors while plugging the negative holes.
6장
Crafting a Compelling Value Proposition
The Value Proposition is the first and most important of the six LIFT Model conversion factors. It drives conversion-rate potential and represents why customers choose your business. While often approached as a logical exercise determining costs and benefits, value proposition must also include emotional attributes and brand essence.
Each prospect views your messaging through unique perceptual filters shaped by their interpretation of colors, word connotations, cultural biases, expectations, mood, environment, previous experiences, and beliefs about quality and value. These filters dramatically alter how prospects understand your messages-even a simple image of a smiling person can trigger vastly different impressions ranging from "happy" and "trustworthy" to "fake" and "staged."
Tangible features are the facts prospects use to logically justify their emotional decisions. These include descriptive characteristics of your product/service and offer elements that can be compared to competitors. Testing can reveal which features to emphasize and how many to include, as the optimal amount varies by situation.
Electronic Arts' The Sims 3 team demonstrated this principle when they worked with WiderFunnel to improve game registration rates. Despite shipping millions of copies, many players only used the launcher to start the game without registering. WiderFunnel tested multiple challenger variations against the control version, resulting in a 128% increase in registrations with the "Free Town" offer. This testing not only improved conversion rates but provided valuable insights about which offers most effectively compelled players to act.
Intangible benefits appeal to emotional desires like comfort, acceptance, power, freedom, control, and love. As sales trainer Tom Hopkins emphasized, "People make a purchase emotionally and defend the purchase rationally." These emotional benefits often matter more than tangible features in purchasing decisions. Starbucks exemplifies this by transforming coffee from a simple morning caffeine source into an experience with intangible benefits of discernment and customization.
Credibility is essential for building trust with prospects-it's difficult to gain and easy to lose. You can test enhancing credibility through professional reviews, media mentions, awards, professionalism in design and copywriting, thought leadership content, and detailed case studies.
Social proof has influenced decisions since prehistoric times. People tend to change opinions to match others, a psychological tendency marketers can leverage by showing how many people support their products. Effective social proof tactics include testimonials (especially when combined with realistic customer photos), client logos, social media indicators, customer ratings and reviews, highlighting customer numbers, and celebrity endorsements.
When selling B2B solutions, don't focus solely on business benefits-remember that people are egocentric and look for personal benefits even in business decisions. Consider emotional benefits like peace of mind, reduced workload, time savings, stress reduction, respect from colleagues, or recognition from management.
7장
The Art of Relevance: Following the Scent Trail
Your prospects behave like animals hunting for information, entertainment, and products online. They follow "scent trails" using refined mental algorithms that evaluate feedback from their environment. Effective marketers enable this hunting behavior by providing clear scent trails through relevance.
Your marketing funnel begins long before prospects reach your website. Relevance must be maintained throughout the entire customer journey, from initial brand awareness through post-purchase experience. From the visitor's perspective, your landing page is just one step in their foraging path. The scent trail must maintain its strength to carry them through to conversion.
Like the martial art of jiu-jitsu, effective marketing uses the prospect's momentum rather than fighting against it. By acknowledging where visitors come from, you can better understand their intentions and guide them to conversion. Whether they were actively searching for your product or were interrupted by your message, they were motivated enough to respond to your call to action.
Ads with high relevance perform vastly better than interruptive ones. This explains why search engine ads for relevant keywords generate higher click-through rates and conversions than social media ads. Search engine users are actively seeking solutions and following scent trails, while social media users are looking for entertainment and connection, making ads there more intrusive.
When people are searching, they switch from processing mode to pattern-matching mode, looking for visual cues that match their search terms rather than deeply processing content. Maintaining a strong scent trail from search keywords to landing page is crucial for conversion. Searchers are actively looking for solutions, making them better prospects than visitors from other media.
However, synonyms can be practically invisible to searchers in pattern-matching mode-if someone searches for "create a will," an ad saying "Legal Will & Testament Services" loses the scent trail immediately. Even close matches like "Make a Will" only partially maintain relevance. Pattern matching is so fundamental that people can identify relevant options even when they don't understand the language, simply by matching visual patterns.
Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) automatically places a searcher's exact terms into ad text, dramatically increasing relevance for pattern-matching searchers. This technique works well for large search campaigns where manual customization would be too time-consuming, but requires careful setup to avoid inserting keywords you can't deliver on.
Email campaigns demand even higher relevance standards than ads because you already know more about your subscribers. A Banana Republic email campaign created seasonal relevance with a tax season reference and 40% discount offer, but failed by not customizing to the recipient's gender despite having purchase history data. The landing page experience was worse-it completely lost relevance by not mentioning the offer, applicable products, or the discount code from the email.
8장
Clarity: The Foundation of Conversion
Clarity is even more fundamental than persuasion in conversion optimization. By minimizing cognitive load for prospects, clarity frees up mental bandwidth for making conversion decisions. Many tests show that improving clarity alone can dramatically increase conversion rates.
Information hierarchy refers to how content is organized, both at the website level (how pages relate to each other) and at the page level (how content is organized within each page). Colonial Candle's case study demonstrated how changing information hierarchy led to a 20% sales lift by reducing clicks needed to reach products and showing all categories on a single page.
At the page level, wireframes are valuable tools for planning content boundaries and defining information hierarchy. These simplified black and white diagrams show content block arrangement without design elements, helping focus on eyeflow and visitor decision-making. By carefully structuring content hierarchy, you reduce visitors' mental energy needed for orientation, allowing them to focus on your message.
For conversion optimization, design must follow function rather than existing for aesthetics alone. The best design "disappears" behind content, facilitating communication without drawing attention to itself. Design should reinforce your value proposition through appropriate choices of style (minimalist or embellished, bold or subdued).
The placement of images, graphics, and copy either guides or blocks your reader's eye. Testing for an online catalog retailer revealed that simply swapping left and right columns produced a 16% sales increase, demonstrating how layout affects content emphasis. Generally, reducing column count improves conversion rates, especially for forms.
Images should communicate and support your value proposition rather than serve as mere decoration. For online retailers, large, zoomable product images help compensate for customers' inability to physically touch items. For intangible products, images should make services feel more tangible, but avoid being "too clever" with visual metaphors that might confuse visitors.
Color plays a crucial role in emphasizing important page elements and enhancing readability. For maximum readability, high contrast between text and background is essential, with lightness contrast being most important. Black text on white background typically offers the highest clarity. In a MerchantWarehouse.com test, increasing text contrast contributed to a 15% lift in lead generation.
The call-to-action (CTA) should be prominent and accessible as soon as prospects are ready to act. Following the sales principle "close early, and close often," CTAs work best when positioned both above the fold and at the bottom of content. While button size matters (too small won't be noticed, too large may not look like a button), the wording can be even more important than design or color.
9장
Managing Anxiety and Distraction
Anxiety creates a major barrier to conversion. Just as we have a built-in "Spidey sense" that alerts us to danger, website visitors constantly scan for reasons to be concerned. Successful sales environments reduce anxiety to prevent closed wallets.
Privacy concerns significantly impact conversion rates, especially in today's environment of data breaches and privacy scandals. Asking for too much information causes 12% of e-commerce shoppers to abandon carts, and 88% of online buyers have intentionally provided incorrect information when registering. To reduce privacy anxiety, test adding contextual help text explaining why you need certain information, move optional fields to thank-you pages, minimize form fields to essentials, and create simple privacy assurances.
Usability anxiety occurs when your website makes prospects feel confused or stupid. Forms are a major source of this anxiety-poor design, confusing error messages, and stark red error text alienate users. WordPress demonstrates low-anxiety error handling with pink shading, red keylines, and helpful messages that appear dynamically during form completion. Website errors and technical glitches destroy credibility-thorough quality assurance across browsers and devices is essential. Site speed also significantly impacts conversion-Google found a 20% revenue difference between pages loading in 0.4 versus 0.9 seconds.
Perceived complexity creates anxiety for prospects. Reducing effort improves conversion rates by making customers' lives easier. E-commerce sites should test relevant filtering options to help users find products quickly. Product pages should emphasize value proposition before ordering details. Offers should be easy to redeem-automatic application of promotional codes is better than requiring manual entry.
Steve Jobs built Apple into a $30 billion company with fewer than 30 major products because of his mastery of focus. He was proud of saying "no" to hundreds of good ideas to focus on the few most important ones. Similarly, effective advertising focuses on a single compelling idea-the one message that will create desire for the product.
Prospects process landing pages in two distinct stages: the initial impression and message consumption. In the first impression (occurring within 0.2 seconds), visual layout above the fold determines whether visitors continue reading or bounce. During this stage, processing is based entirely on visual shapes and color. After this, visitors take up to three seconds to scan the page before their eyes settle on their first focus area.
Common first-impression distractions include: too much content (too many columns, redundant categories, excessive text), daunting text blocks (use paragraphs no more than three lines high), complex graphics (every visual element adds mental processing), large headers (wasting valuable screen space), and redundant calls to action (creating visual confusion).
Despite logical arguments for providing many options to visitors, behavioral research shows that too many choices paralyze decision-making. When given too many messages, none stick. Common message distractions include: competing stakeholder messages, multiple product lines, irrelevant content, overwhelming product options, prominent up-sells that distract from primary products, excessive navigation bars, and images that don't support the value proposition.
10장
Creating a Culture of Strategic Marketing Optimization
The first step in your test plan is establishing clear goals that align with your overall conversion optimization objectives. Your goals should be as close to revenue as possible, whether you're focused on lead generation, e-commerce, affiliate marketing, or subscription models. Be cautious about using clickthrough rates as your primary metric-they can be misleading since clicks don't necessarily indicate purchase intent.
When selecting your test area, you have several options beyond just individual pages. You might test templated pages, individual static pages, pages with dynamic content, or site-wide sections. Template tests often yield the most rewarding results because they reach most website visitors at once, complete more quickly, provide consistent user experience, and allow for more dramatic layout changes.
When deciding between A/B/n testing and multivariate testing (MVT), consider your traffic volume first. MVT offers advantages like isolating small elements, measuring interaction effects, facilitating statistical analysis, and enabling incremental improvement. However, MVT requires significantly more traffic to reach statistical significance, restricts major layout changes, and limits creative freedom. A/B/n testing provides greater flexibility for dramatic layout changes, allows advanced analytics integration, completes tests more quickly, and often achieves more dramatic conversion lifts.
Understanding test results requires careful statistical analysis to avoid the common human tendency to see patterns where none exist. The scientific marketing process requires rigor that most aren't accustomed to. Proper test monitoring requires patience and discipline. Wait at least 10 days over two weekends to account for day-of-week seasonality. Organizations have different comfort levels with statistical significance-some accept 80% while others require 95% or higher.
When evaluating test results, understand that statistical significance doesn't guarantee precision in the lift percentage. A 95% confidence level means you can be confident the result is directionally correct 19 times out of 20, but the exact lift may fall within a range. With multiple conversion goals, weight each by its value contribution.
Conversion optimization is a continuous improvement process, not a one-time achievement. After each test, re-evaluate your priorities based on new findings. A big lift might indicate even more potential for improvement on that page, while minimal movement could suggest either low elasticity or testing the wrong elements. Even inconclusive tests provide valuable learning about what doesn't work for your audience.
"Conversion-rate optimization" is actually a misnomer that implies conversion rate should be the sole testing goal. In reality, testing produces much more: revenue improvement, customer insights, and an organizational culture shift toward data-driven decision-making. When you leverage ongoing learning from conversion testing, you've progressed to Strategic Marketing Optimization (SMO).
Your organization needs someone to champion marketing optimization against cultural resistance to data-driven decision-making. To create this culture: secure senior-level buy-in by showing how optimization helps executives reach their incentivized goals; create tangible problems testing can solve; conduct low-profile "skunkworks" tests to gain quick wins; involve all departments early; tie results directly to revenue impact rather than just percentages; share results widely through company presentations; establish yourself as a thought leader; and never give up despite opposition and distractions. Companies that resist testing will eventually yield to competitors who embrace it.
