New Book: How I’ll Maximize Your Web Site’s Conversion Rate

Essential Info

• The goal of my next book is to show exactly which quick fixes to common web page content & design issues have the greatest impact on success, providing a practical guide that anyone can use to improve any site’s conversion rate.
• The method will be to test a set of (probably) 50 common fixes on maybe 25 different sites.
• Every fix will be tested on many different sites, to provide more empirical data. Each site will benefit from at least 2 tests (the higher the traffic, the more tests we can run).
• The book will be published by US publisher Wrox/Wiley sometime in 2010. The title has not yet been selected.
• The majority of the writing is planned for February – May 2010. Experiments will run over November 2009 through to May 2010.
• Every site I use in the optimisation project will feature in the book. Site owners must give permission for us to publish the before & after images of the site, with close-up screenshots and conversion statistis.
• We aim to publish a supporting web site that will provide additional details on the experiments and follow-up projects. Your site may also be featured on this site, with your permission, which will provide further exposure.
• My personal aim is to double (at least) the conversion rate of every page in the test. I cannot guarantee any particular conversion for every site, but some may convert 500% as many visitors. (Of course, the value of the improvement depends on your profit per conversion, so even modest improvements can pay dividends on many sites.)
• I’m charging a small fee for submissions of £995 (GBP).

Does Your Site Qualify?

• In order to qualify, your site needs a clear goal you’d like visitors to achieve.
• You’ll also need sufficient traffic to achieve meaningful results in a reasonable timeframe (3 months max). As a guide, site should get over 50 visits per day to qualify.
• The more visitors your site gets, the more tests and variations we’ll be able to perform in the test period. Sites with lower traffic benefit more from running a sequence of quicker tests (i.e. A/B split tests, or small multivariate tests with fewer permutations).

The Process

1. When you apply (by emailing me at optimise@scratchmedia.co.uk, please tell me how much traffic your site gets, and your conversion goal (the visitor action we’ll use to measure success).
2. If I select your site, we’ll then agree a test period. I’ll ask you to commit to keeping content and design of the tested page(s) more or less unchanged during the period of the test.
3. I’ll choose some target fixes (normally between 3-10 to test at a time), and discuss these with you. We’ll only implement content or design changes with your agreement.
4. We’ll arrange access to your source code and agree the start date for the tests.
5. Our team will run one or more multivariate tests on your site. We’ll report meaningful statistics to you on a regular basis.
6. We may remove weaker combinations from experiments, or stop & re-start experiments to test new ideas and gain further incremental improvements. (Could return to #3 above.)
7. The experiments could stop after a few weeks to 3 months (depending on traffic), when significant improvements have been achieved.

Did I Answer Your Questions?

If you have further questions, please email me at optimise@scratchmedia.co.uk, and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

Best wishes,

Ben Hunt
Scratchmedia, 2009