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Incremental performance jumps with huge % increase wins are extremely rare. I can easily jack up click-throughs on a new banner or get users to fill out forms

Incremental performance jumps with huge % increase wins are extremely rare. I can easily jack up click-throughs on a new banner or get users to fill out forms more by changing text copy and/or CTA size/positioning/color, but that doesn't mean those increases translate to an incremental improvement in overall prospect to lead conversion rates - you very well might just be shooting yourself in the foot by killing good conversion rates later on in the funnel with your upstream changes. A good example was moving the lead gen form on a paid search destination landing page from below the fold to above the fold.. what did we see? More form conversions, a 30%+ increase actually. Yay! Dug into it further and what we actually found was that customers who were looking for customer service were clicking paid search ads for the company and filling out the form to try to reach customer service rather than reading the lead gen CTA's on the page that clearly spoke to new customers. Unless you have a very controlled linear sales funnel, websites are spider-webs with numerous paths visitors could take to arrive at the content they're looking for. So you always have to take into account what downstream changes you could be introducing with a "big win increase test" on your site's homepage.

cometrico 12y ago
From what I've seen, many companies see some “big” wins early on, which start to taper off into fewer, often smaller wins the more they test. Typically people are testing things such as moving the form fields above the fold, changing CTA colors/text, updating headlines, etc – smaller tweaks to an existing design, or rather, optimizing for the local maximum. As a result, fewer and smaller wins over time intuitively makes sense, as there is a certain point (a theoretical “perfect” page) where you can no longer improve a design. While it is highly unlikely you will ever reach that “perfect” design, the more you test, the closer you will get. If you are only optimizing for the local maximum, you could be leaving conversions on the table by not trialing “bigger” changes, or rather, optimizing for the global maximum (change to process flow / conversion funnel, introducing a totally new page template, etc). In doing so, it is more likely you will see bigger effects.

cometrico 12y ago

From what I've seen, many companies see some “big” wins early on, which start to taper off into fewer, often smaller wins the more they test. Typically people are testing things such as moving the form fields above the fold, changing CTA colors/text, updating headlines, etc – smaller tweaks to an existing design, or rather, optimizing for the local maximum. As a result, fewer and smaller wins over time intuitively makes sense, as there is a certain point (a theoretical “perfect” page) where you can no longer improve a design. While it is highly unlikely you will ever reach that “perfect” design, the more you test, the closer you will get. If you are only optimizing for the local maximum, you could be leaving conversions on the table by not trialing “bigger” changes, or rather, optimizing for the global maximum (change to process flow / conversion funnel, introducing a totally new page template, etc). In doing so, it is more likely you will see bigger effects.