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Dec 13, 2010 | 2 minute read
written by Linda Bustos
When A/B testing web design, copy, merchandising or promotions, the most important thing is understanding what metrics you will use to determine success. It’s not always “conversion rate.”
Conversion rate is typically expressed as number of conversion actions (sales, email sign ups, clicks on calls to action) divided by total visitors or unique visitors.
But focusing on conversion rate without understanding its relationship to other metrics may lead you to wrong conclusions in your testing. Consider the following:
A real life example: Skritter boasts a 218% conversion improvement with no impact on sales. It’s landing page tripled the number of clicks to its software demo, but had no impact on sales or revenue.
Beyond conversion rate, are you tracking the following?
Many of these metrics don’t come out of the box with your analytics tool. Some of them can be imported into your paid / enterprise analytics tool from other systems (check with your vendor). Yahoo Web Analytics and Omniture have both shared instructions for importing COGS (cost of goods sold), for example. Google Analytics doesn't allow you to import cost data, which is one reason to explore a paid tool (unless you’re a wizard with Excel, then you could export conversion data out of GA).
If you plan on A/B or multivariate testing in 2011, make sure you incorporate one or more financial metrics in your test analysis (at minimum, revenue and revenue per visitor which come out of the box).