The ROI / Business case for testing

Sometimes it's hard to convince your boss that your company should invest precious resources into running content experiments. One way to communicate the business value of testing is to run the numbers.

As an example, let's say your company currently acquires customers or sells products online. Let's assume every year, 1 million visitors reach your site and 5% proceed past your home page, 10% of those proceed past your product/service details page, and 20% of those ultimately become customers. Let's also assume the average sale is $250. This would equate to 1,000 customers and $250,000 in revenue for every 1,000,000 visitors. Not too shabby right?

Now assume that by testing alternate content and page designs, you were able to increase the advance rates for each step of the sales process by a small percentage. Let's say that now 6% of visitors advanced past the home page, 12% past the details page, and 24% to the final checkout / contact page. By improving only 3 pages by small percentages, with the same number of visitors each year, instead of acquiring 1,000 customers and $250,000 in revenue, you'd now acquire 1,728 customers and generate $432,000 in revenue!

	BEFORE	AFTER
Visitors	1,000,000	1,000,000
Home page Advance Rate	5%	6%
Product Detail Page Advance Rate	10%	12%
Contact Us Completion Rate	20%	24%
Conversions	1,000	1,728
Average Sale	$250	$250
Total Sales	$250,000	$432,000

So at the end of the day, using experiments to find better-performing content can dramatically increase your sales without increasing your spending. After using Website Optimizer to improve your ROI, you might even find your boss asking you why aren't you testing more often.

Go back to article list