Conversion Rate Optimization for Traffic-Stricken Websites

Imagine this: After years of running your business, what if someone told you

“You could have achieved 200% more conversion by changing the color of the ‘Request a quote’ button?”

Or what if you come to know that you could have made billions instead of millions by re-wording that large banner on your landing page?

And what if you discovered your competitor has been getting all this right, all along, as he continuously optimizes his conversion rate?

Do not wait for that day.
Do not stop optimizing your website just because someone told you “Oh, your website traffic is too low for A/B testing”.

Yes that’s what it is ! At Zarget, we believe that there is always a way, irrespective of the traffic your website receives. Curious much? Read on!

If you are a small to mid-sized business owner seeking website optimization, then instead of looking at the lack of traffic as your stumbling block to run optimization tests, there are ways to bend the general industry rules wisely to your advantage and achieve higher conversion rates.

Here are some popular industry rules for running A/B tests for websites with high traffic and ways to circumvent them and make them work on websites with low traffic.

General Industry Practice: You need at least 5000 unique visitors to run an A/B test. Your A/B test requires this number of visitors to assimilate enough data to arrive at a statistically significant result.

For websites with low-traffic: Here is our tip — stop being so hung up on A/B tests. Go for sequential tests; run one version at a time. This way, instead of breaking whatever little traffic you receive into two halves, you can direct it wholly to one version only and gauge responses better. This method is a little time consuming, but it definitely compensates for the lack of traffic. While at it, invest in a good PPC campaign, or send mailers to your customers to channel all this traffic to your website. This will increase the quality of your test multi-fold!

To get accurate results, run the second test on the exact same days of the week, for the same time period and put in the same marketing efforts. Maintain an identical climate.

General Industry Practice: A/B test EVERYTHING

For websites with low-traffic : When you simply cannot afford to test everything, make BIG changes instead of low key ones such as changing the colour of your CTA buttons or changing the font. Change the message on your banner or completely change the colour scheme of your landing page — just think big! This will increase the prospect of seeing a striking difference in conversion rate, which will tell you if the changes you made are working in your favor or not.

General Industry Practice: Pick a page and start running tests

For websites with low-traffic : There is a small math involved in choosing the right candidate page for performing A/B tests, when website traffic is scarce. Pick a page that is already performing well and is receiving the highest amount of traffic. This broadens your testing horizons and maximizes efficiency. Once you test a few variations on this page and have a clear winner, you can make the change site-wide! This option is a short cut to achieve statistical significance within a reasonable frame of time.

General Industry Practice: Always test for conversion

For websites with low-traffic : Instead of focusing too much on pages directly linked to conversion/sales such as your checkout pages we urge you to go higher up in the funnel and make something else your unit of measurement. You can check for the actual time a visitor spends on your site or learn what elements get clicked the most and what parts of your website are loved the least. You can employ heat maps and click maps to obtain these statistics. Once you have the numbers, measure the impact they have on your conversion. For all you know, these little road bumps could be contributing largely to the low conversion rates and are excellent candidates for optimization.

Now that we have discussed all the important rules, there is just one golden rule when it comes to web pages with low traffic: lower the traffic, longer the wait! But the more you test, the more you optimize. The more you optimize, the more you monetize.

Do not let the fears of low website traffic get to you. Start optimizing today !