The Matt Report will be getting a minor facelift soon to accommodate the Pro membership portion.
Instead of landing on the homepage and seeing the blog roll, the visitor will be presented with a unique landing page with a few new options. I’ll be using the Gravity Forms plugin and the Mailchimp addon to connect visitors to my newsletter.
I use GF as my contact form because I can connect it to Trello and other services. Now I can use it’s built in conversion tracking to help with some basic split testing. Here’s how!
Contents
Split Testing
This might be obvious to the seasoned web marketer, but if you’re new to all of this, split testing can yield some really good results.
Let’s say you’re looking for conversions to your newsletter signup.
You might try two different call to actions or headlines to entice someone to enter their e-mail. It doesn’t have to be just copy that you’re split testing either. You can try various colors, font sizes, buttons etc to measure these conversions. If you’re a Gravity Forms user already, you may have noticed that there’s a conversion column that spits out your percentage of signups.
At the bottom of my blog posts, I have an after post widget that holds a gravity form signup to my newsletter. I added this about a month ago and I’m seeing a 3% conversion. Wether or not that is a good number is still to be determined. I have many call to actions for my newsletter, most noticeably a popup I run on top of the page load.
Pro tip: you’re going to need some traffic to your site before you split test. If you don’t have enough traffic to compare two different call to actions it’s going to be difficult to determine if one converts better over the other.
A lesson in split testing and pop-ups
Pop-ups, love em or hate em?
I had a discussion a few months ago in the WordPress Entrepreneurs group about using them on your site. You hear how much people hate them and how annoying they are. All we can imagine is our old infected Windows 98 machine.
I had been running one on my site for a while when my friend Curtis McHale mentioned he didn’t like using them. He recommend I try this plugin, which slides up from the bottom right. Less intrusive as it were, because who likes a pop-up?
So I decided to run a major split test which cost me a lot of subscribers and potential future revenue. I disabled the popup that we all hate — and here’s the result:
Wait a minute, I thought people hated popups? If this were the case, shouldn’t we see a lower conversion rate as people close out and escape these pesky overlays?
Before you say it, no, I do not blame Curtis
Kicking it back on for December, I saw 5x and above average conversions.
I was on the fence about using the popup myself. If I go to a site that I don’t normally frequent and I get hit with the popup, I’m trained to close it.
But that’s just one visit.
What happens when I return to this content that I really like? On my second and third visits the popup is now a consideration and not an annoyance. As you can see from my Mailchimp graph above, dropping the the popup for the month of November really hurt me. Kicking it back on for December, I saw 5x and above average conversions.
Now that I know popups don’t ruin my signups, but increase them — I can now dig deeper and split test each popup. Pretty amazing stuff.
Split testing Gravity Forms
What we’re doing is randomly serving up a call to action and e-mail field from Gravity Forms. It’s not 100% “the right way” because I’m not setting a cookie for the session of the visitor. If you refresh the page, you have a 50/50 chance of seeing the other headline. If you’re doing split testing for e-commerce, you probably don’t want your visitor to see two different prices simply by hitting reload.
That aside, if you’re looking to try this with your Gravity Forms, here’s the code! (Special thanks to Robert Neu for hooking this up for me on a Saturday afternoon!)
https://gist.github.com/fatmedia/8289103
Permanent link to this post here
