In our earlier posts in this five-part series on optimizing your sales funnel through testing have brought us to a fourth important step. After collecting data, prioritizing what and where to test, and identifying Key Performance Indicators, it’s time to consider how many different variations of a funnel step you want to test at the same time.
In our earlier posts in this five-part series on optimizing your sales funnel through testing have brought us to a fourth important step. After collecting data (hyperlink to Blog 1), prioritizing what and where to test (hyperlink to Blog 2), and identifying Key Performance Indicators (hyperlink to Blog 3), it’s time to consider how many different variations of a funnel step you want to test at the same time.
When considering variations to test, keep in mind that the more variations you have, the less traffic each variation within that test will receive.
For example, if a page in your sales funnel is receiving 100 visitors per day and you have two variations that you are testing against each other, each variation will hypothetically receive 50 visitors. If you have three variations, the number of visitors each variation will receive drops down to roughly 33. This means that in order for your test to achieve a significant result, you will have to run your test longer.
How long?
The length it takes to run a test depends on a number of factors, such as how many visitors a test is receiving and the size of the variant(s) improvement. In other words, if a variant is significantly beating the control and the test is receiving a good amount of traffic, you will receive a significant result quicker than you would otherwise.
Typically when you use a Testing Platform (like Convert, Google Optimize, VWO or Optimizely), the software will calculate the confidence interval.
(Confidence level inside of Convert, a recommended testing platform)
At a minimum, we recommend running a test for seven days or a full business cycle, regardless of the results and confidence interval. However, your test may very well take longer depending on the volume of visitors your test is receiving.
The bottom line is that when planning your tests, take into consideration how much traffic you are getting to the sales funnel pages. The more traffic your page is getting, the more variations you can test. If your page is not getting a lot of traffic, then you probably only want to test one or two variants.
In our next and final post in this five-part series on testing for sales funnel optimization, we will get into the nuts and bolts of implementing your test.