Your website is a leaky bucket & it’s losing you money.

Or rather, your website isn’t perfect. Far from it.

Spending money on ‘traffic’?  Let’s call that traffic water, and your site is the bucket – a holey one.

The vast majority of traffic slides right out of your website.  A very small percentage of people do what YOU want them to do – convert – be that making a purchase or handing over their contact info . If you want profit, you want more of these ‘conversions’. Conversions are what makes your site (and lets face it, your business) profitable.

Traffic is expensive, and it’s pouring out of your site.  The obvious solution?

Mend as many holes as possible.

But where specifically are the holes? And what exactly do you need to do to patch them up?

The short answer?

Test different things on your site.

Your visitors, the very traffic you pay for, have the solution.

Test different things.  The next step is the most important – measure the results.  Learn what your visitors (you’re paying for them remember) prefer.

They are ‘voting with their mouse’ as they navigate through your site.   Watch and listen carefully, they’ll tell you exactly what you need to do to make more money.

Why is it so important to test?

Testing is hard & expensive, is it really that crucial?

Yes – Here’s why.

#1 Your Site Isn’t Perfect

Your site may be a work of digital art, the sleekest design possible and certainly not ugly, but it’s not perfect. There is always room for improvement. Every site could be better.  By better, I mean convert traffic more efficiently

#2 Testing Pays for Itself (really quickly)

Don’t need to go out & buy more traffic (Adwords, Facebook, radio, TV etc). Get those existing visitors to do more of what you want.  Same ad spend, bigger return.  It doesn’t take a big increase to pay for a year of testing & improvements. Remember that small increases in revenue generally equate to large increases in net profit.

#3 AdWords isn’t Getting Cheaper

If your business relies on paid traffic to generate a significant portion of revenue, then testing is vital. Higher profits mean you can afford to branch out to different traffic sources. You’re not dependent on the ‘one legged stool’ any more!

#4 Your Competition is Testing

If they’re not testing, they’ll learn about testing soon.  The first mover gets a big advantage so why not blow them out of the water.  If you can convert more traffic, you can afford to pay more for it.

If you can afford to spend $5 to get a visitor but your non testing competitor can only spend $2.50, then you buy traffic they can’t. Tiny hinges swing big doors. 97% of the profits in most markets are split between 3% of the players.

Fixing the leaky bucket isn’t getting a new website, it’s not getting the latest design, it’s not changing the colour of the buttons (but that might help).

It’s done through Intelligent Web Design.  Something you’ll be able to read more about here in the next few weeks.  Watch this space.