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.

In our previous two posts, we covered the beginnings of how to optimize your sales funnel through testing. Once you’ve started by collecting data and have figured out the area of your sales funnel that needs the most optimization, we get to the most important step – figuring out what Key Performance Indicator(s), or KPI(s), you want to improve. 

A KPI is a metric that is used to measure the performance and progress toward a business goal. 

Examples of Key Performance Indicators include: 

• Funnel Step Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who visit Step 1 of your sales funnel and move on to Step 2
• Purchase Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who visit Step 1 and end up purchasing a product later on
• Open Rate Percentage and Click Rate Percentage: The percentage of people who open or click an email
• Cost Per Conversion (CPC) or Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• Bounce Rate: percentage of people who land on your website and leave immediately

After you have your KPI(s) for your test, use them to create an objective.

An objective for your test might be “to improve my lead capture page conversion rate,” or even “to improve my lead capture page conversion rate without lowering my sales conversion rate.”  (In the second example, two KPIs are being used.)

Once you’ve figured out what your testing objective is, then you can start figuring out what element(s) on your sales funnel step you are going to test. There really isn’t a set standard in terms of what specific elements of a page you should prioritize, but anything you decide to test should answer your test’s objective.

When working with a brand new page, we try to test more wholesale changes, such as different layouts or designs, or even a completely different copy angle. This is because when you are launching a brand new page there is no set baseline, so it’s a good opportunity to figure out a starting point.

But once a page’s starting performance has been established, the changes that you test should be more subtle.

Using Qualitative Visual Reporting tools such as Heatmaps, Scrollmaps or Visitor Recordings can help you figure out how people are interacting with your page. A good place to start is often testing specific copy tweaks, like headlines. Copy can have a huge impact and is fairly easy to implement.

At the end of the day, before you launch any test, you need to be able to develop a hypothesis that reflects your overall objective. 

Example hypotheses include:

“Headline B will have a higher conversion rate than Headline A,” 

or

“Using an orange button instead of a green button will improve conversion rates.” 

The bottom line is that anything you test should be rooted with the objective of improving your Key Performance Indicators.

In our next blog post in this series about optimizing your sales funnel through testing, we will focus on planning how many variations of a funnel step to test and minimizing the length of time it takes to run a proper test.

Let’s say that Step 1 of your sales funnel is your lead capture page and Step 2 is your sales page, and you decided to test both steps at the same time (see diagram below). If your sales increased by 10%, which test can you really attribute the increase to?

Split testing confusing.  Example of cross pollination. 

Did an increase in leads generate more sales? Did an improvement in the sales page itself produce the sale? Is there a combination of variations that produce more sales when they interact with each other?  

You just cannot definitively know.

This is called “cross-pollination,” and when starting out with testing, it’s something that you ideally try to avoid. When beginning to plan your tests, you need to look at the data that you have been gathering from your tracking tools to identify what the high-priority weak spots of your sales funnel are.

It’s often good to start at the top of the funnel. If visitors are not making it past Step 1 of your funnel, they are not ever going to see Step 2, Step 3, Step 4 and so on. So in this scenario, your sales funnel is “clogged,” and Step 1 should be the first place you look at to optimize your funnel.

If Step 1 is performing well, however, but Step 2 is performing poorly, then begin with Step 2. 

The bottom line is that you should use your data to paint a mental picture of what is going on within your funnel from a 1,000-foot view.

Once you have a better understanding of where you would like to see improvement in your sales funnel, then you can focus on what exactly it is you will be testing.

In our next blog, we’ll focus on identifying metrics and objectives for your tests and why this is the most important part when it comes to optimizing your sales funnel.