How To Get A 480% Increase In Conversions In Just 4 Days (Without Spending More Money)

Ah, hyped headlines, don’t you love ‘em? 😉

The best part about that particular example is that it’s true.

Recently, I created a Facebook Ads campaign for a client in order to ensure they got a steady stream of qualified people to their offer.

The offer (in this case) was a free ticket to a local business event.

With the traffic flowing, we decided to test the landing page to which we were sending the traffic.

For the first test, we decided to keep the video, images and text the same, but to change the layout of the page…

So, we set up the test in Google Experiments and told it to split the traffic evenly between 3 different versions of the same page.

The test showed us that the original page was converting, but that a change in layout would give us a few percent increase in conversions (more people signing up, presumably because they were able to digest the information more quickly or easily).

However, I felt like there was more to get from this campaign…

So, we set up another test, this time changing only the headline.

(Incidentally, if you’re not familiar with split-testing, it’s crucial that you only ever test one thing at a time. So if you’re testing the image on your pages, don’t then start testing the headline too, otherwise you won’t know which change yielded the result.)

So, off I went to Google Experiments (part of Google Analytics) and set up another test between 3 different headlines.

The results, as you’re about to see, were pretty crazy…

With no extra increase in traffic or ad spend, we were able to determine two things:

• My initial headline was crap
• Another headline could get us a 480% increase in conversions (from 2.7% to 15.69%)!

Needless to say, we changed the headline on the campaign tout de suite and we’re now getting much higher conversions.

Here’s how you set up an experiment:

1. Decide on what you’re going to test. You probably have loads of hypotheses like ‘Oooh! If we move that image here then I bet we’ll get more opt-ins’. Alright Einstein, test it!
2. Create 2 variations of the page you want to test, changing one element on them (the headline, the images or the layout are good places to start).
3. Go to your Google Analytics account and go to the ‘Behavior’ menu. From there click on ‘Experiments’ (pictured right).
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to set up the original page and then the variations.
5. Add the code that Google gives you to your original page only (if you have a WordPress site then you can use a great plugin called ‘WP Content Experiments’ to paste the code into the page.)

Then set the experiment live and keep an eye on it over the coming few days.

In the example above, I set the confidence threshold to 95% and the minimum run-time of the experiment to 3 days.

(The confidence threshold is the level of how likely any one version is to win the split test. Setting it to 95% means Google has to be 95% sure that one particular version will win.)

Naturally, to make this work quickly for yourself, you need to ensure that you already have plenty of traffic going to that original page.

(If you don’t have enough traffic yet, then you’ll want to check out one of our upcoming webinars on traffic generation.)

Now, think about this for a second…

What if you were selling a product right now that was worth £30, and for every 100 people that saw your offer, 2 people purchased (a 2% conversion rate).

Let’s say it costs you £28 to get 100 visitors.

So, for every £28 you spend on traffic each week, you’re making £60 in sales. Good work so far, but…

Let’s say that you ran a split test changing nothing but the headline. You run the test for a week and you find that one headline increases your conversions from 2% to 4%.

You haven’t increased your budget at all, yet in one week, you’ve gone from making 2 sales per 100 visitors, to 4 sales.

That’s a 100% increase in sales, with no extra spend (or from £32 profit per week to £92 profit per week). Over the course of a year, that means you’re now making an extra £3,120 per year from that one product.

Sound good? Well, over to you…

What can you test in your business right now that could increase your conversion rate?

Or would you prefer us to help you increase your conversions while you get on with running your business? Check out our services, which include Conversion Optimisation.

Matt Duggan is one of RoarLocal’s marketing ninjas, specialising in conversion optimisation and lead generation using Facebook Ads. You can get in touch with him via the RoarLocal website or leave any questions in the comments section below.

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