the goose

Last year I set up an A/B test on our ebook subscription page on Piehole.ie.  We are a pretty low traffic site but I didn’t let that stop me drawing conclusions early on.  My thought was that hard as nails sales copy was outperforming a very much more understated (and a little scrappy) subscription page.

It looks like I jumped to conclusions though.  Checking back again this morning after some time I noticed that actually, the simple copy out-performs the snazzy buy now copy.  This goes against conventional wisdom.

Of course google did tell me that the early results had a weak level of confidence but I was too impatient to wait for confirmation.  It is just by luck that I forgot to stop the experiment early on.

This morning we are spending the day looking at our sales copy on Piehole and thinking about how we can improve our click throughs.  SEO has been a somewhat thankless task for us.  The market is small and haven’t been very successful on getting click throughs on our targeted keywords . We do appear on the front page of most of the useful ones but getting to the next stage is a little trickier.  A useful model I am going to use, that I learned about a couple of years ago at John Coburn’s SEO seminar for small business, is AIDA (attention, interest, desire/decision, action)  and it works like this.  This is the original default title:

Ireland’s Largest Voiceover Directory Read the rest of this entry »

Having heard Caelen talk a little about A/B testing on his site, I decided to finally have a go for myself. The results were cringe-inducing for two reasons. The first reason is that you get to see exactly how important copy is on your site. The second is that what works isn’t necessarily what your mother would have wished for you. I decided to A/B test our Piehole ebook/newsletter page. The page had some pretty straight talking copy on it so I dug out some ’sales copy’ that I had left over from the Commission Blueprint course I bought a couple of weeks ago. The difference in the copy is as clear as night and day. Our original version was pretty understated …

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The second ‘new’ version was hardcore. There was more than a little controversy amongst the piehole team when I posted it up.

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I really thought that the original – less salesy copy might do the trick. But …

the new variation seems to be beating the crap out of our clever copy.

UPDATE:  Caelen reminded me this morning of the importance of sample size when it comes to A/B testing.  I cheked back on my A/B test this morning and the results are not as clear cut as they first appeared.  You can see below that the ’scary’ copy is still working better but by a far lower margin.  I still haven’t collected enough data for a ‘high confidence’ result though.

I recently set up a brand new piehole website. The site is a carbon copy of our ‘on-site’ optimised UK and Ireland versions.  I ran the new site through website grader.  The site scored 21 out of a 100 as opposed to 85 out of 100 for our Irish site  (which includes offsite optimisation).  So how much of your effort should you spend on onsite optimisation vs offsite?

80/20

The Pareto Principle isn’t wrong.  I’m assuming of course that the Irish site would be at 100% if it were fully off-site optimsed.

We’ve been focusing a lot more on our SEO effort for www.piehole.ie recently and there is a LOT to do.  Besides writing the blog and upgrading various parts of the site there is a tonne of work to be done.  The worst thing about it is that you are not guaranteed any success and success may only come months later.  In order to keep the moral up on the treck to Google stardome we have been using the website grader.  THe mysteries of SEO are manyfold and this is a useful tool for measuring success along the way.  While all this doesn’t wave a magic wand it does help us get out of our own way and make sure that we take advantage of any easy wins.