mat t hewwo o dward.co .ukhttp://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tips/how-i- increased-pro fits-by-changing-the-co lour-o f-a-button/

Matthew Woodward

How To Increase Profits By 20% By Changing The Colour Of AButton

If you’re a f ull t ime SEO then it is likely you track a huge range of metrics on your site.

Most people tend to f ocus on where they rank, the amount of traf f ic they are getting and how much moneythey are making.

SEO’s are usually very busy people managing lots of sites so it ’s logical to f ocus on the core metrics.

But there is another much more important metric you need to f ocus on which could be costinghundreds/thousands in commissions every day.

Conversion Rate Explained

The conversion rate is the percentage of people that visit your site compared the amount of people thatcomplete a specif ic goal.

A Goal can be anything f rom a newsletter signup to clicking your af f iliate link.

For example if 100 people a day visityour page and only 1 of them f inds andclicks your af f iliate link you have a 1%click through conversion rate.

There is a case study at the end ofthis article that shows you how Iincreased the overall revenue of asite by 20% just by changing thecolour of a button.

Why Is This Important?

Well let’s assume you have a 1% clickthrough conversion rate which earns you£10 per day. 99% of the traf f ic goes towaste which leaves an awf ul lot ofmoney on the table.

If you could increase it to just 2% you could double the amount of money you earn instantly with the sameamount of traf f ic.

Let’s f ace it, getting a website ranked in Google is hard work so once you have a steady f low of traf f ic youneed to maximize the earnings per visitor as much as possible.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

This will vary depending how you push people through your af f iliate link. Some people just use straight textlinks while others will use price comparison tables, buttons or banners.

We can setup tests to measure how ef f ective your af f iliate link placement is and then test it against othervariations to see which gets the better response f rom your traf f ic.

It sounds complicated but here is how it works, let’s assume you have a blue buy now button-

1. Create a red version of the button

2. Show half of your traf f ic the red button and the other half the blue button

3. Measure which one gets the highest click through rate

4. Take the winning button and setup another test to improve conversion f urther

You can literally test anything f rom link placement to the colour of the link. Even testing the headline of thepage can reduce bounce rate and improve click through rate.

I would recommend you start by optimising your af f iliate links though.

Conversion Rate Optimisation Case Study

The best way f or me to illustrate this is with one of my own conversion rate optimisation tests.

I have a website and the sole purpose is to get the user to click on a banner with my af f iliate link.

The original banner had a 41.5% click through rate and looked like this (I have removed the text)-

Orig inal Banne r

I then create 4 variations of the banner which looked like this-

Co mb inatio n 1 - Blue

Co mb inatio n 2 - Re d

Co mb inatio n 3 - Purp le

Co mb inatio n 4 - Orang e

I setup a split test f or all of the banners which would rotate them evenly to my visitors. With 5 banners in thetest they were each shown 20% of the time.

I use Google Website Optimizer f or most of my conversion rate experiments which is f ree and easy to use.

I let the test run f or a week to collect enough data to make a decision on. You might need to run your owntests f or longer depending on traf f ic volume.

The Results

The results are actually quite interesting-

As you can see the original banner had a41.46% click through rate and wasactually the worst perf orming banner outof all of them.

The best perf orming banner was theCombination 2 which had a massive52.25% click through rate. That is amassive improvement to the overall clickthrough rate of the page.

In total I ran 7880 visitors through thistest, if they were all shown the originalbanner I would have gotten 3,267 clicksto my af f iliate link.

If I had shown them all Combination 2then I would have gotten 4,117 clicks tomy af f iliate link.

That’s an extra 850 clicks to earn potential commission f rom with the same amount of traf f ic. Just f romchanging the colour of a button!

So this test simple test achieved-

An Improved click through rate to 52.25% f rom 41.46%

That is a 20% improvement over the original

An extra 850 af f iliate link clicks

Summary

I hope you can see why you should be paying more attention to how many people actually click on your af f iliatelink once on your site.

We work hard to get traf f ic to our pages but many of us don’t pay the same care and attention to convertingthat traf f ic into cold hard cash.

How much money is your site leaving on the table every single day?