Every Flap Of A Butterfly Wing Makes A Huge Difference
Jul 26th, 2008 | By NicolaCairncross | Category: Money Gym | Diaries
We have discovered an amazing new toy / tool this week and it’s called the Google Website Optimiser.
Now those webmeisters amongst you will already know of this wondrous machine, but most ordinary folks won’t…..or won’t have realised how easy it is to use!
Or what a huge effect you can have on sales, tweaking and tweaking and improving by tiny amounts, multiplying the effect, until you have the best possible performing sales page. A super-model of a sales page in fact.
This is called the Butterfly Effect and is described by Wikipedia as “The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system”
Mike Filsaime first use this phrase with respect to internet marketing, in his famous “Butterfly Marketing Report” which i have just re-read for the second time and made loads of notes from.
He was referring to “The idea that a butterfly’s wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events”.
You can get your copy of that excellent report here
Basically, with Optimiser, you can test every element of your page, either one element at a time, or ALL AT ONCE. Can you see how amazing that would be, never having to guess if a change was going to have a good or bad effect on sales?
Also, I found out something even more amazing, which is that a small % effect has a bigger effect as your numbers increase. Found an online calculator creted by a guy in New York called Prusak, that illustrated this at his blog http://www.prusak.com/tools/conversion-confidence-calculator/ - play around with that for a while.
We have held off using Google Website Optimiser - a completely free tool - until our Google Analytics code was all upgraded to the new version, and it was confirmed by our SEO specialists as working properly. This had previously revealed that our blog was not being “seen” by Google, sitting on our domain, which necessitated a moving of both blog and site to brand new hosting to make sure it was all set up right.
The next step after that was to install Google Conversion code on our key pages. You “tag” the sales/action page, and “tag” the thank you page, and it tracks conversions of page views to actions.
This has thrown up the remarkable fact that our ebook sales page is converting organic traffic page views to “buy” clicks at an astonishing 16% plus.
(In fact warm traffic is converting at 33% currently, as I’ve just sent out a promotion for the Internet Marketing Home Study System, which normally sells for £1497 but which you get access to, totally free, if you join Money Gym Silver by buying an ebook and then staying in after your free trial expires. Now that’s a great deal but I’ve just realised it will skew our results for a few days)
So, you would think it would follow that, if organic traffic converts page views to sales at 16%, then Google Adwords traffic would too. Oh no. I achieved page one on Google within two hours with all of my tightly targeted ads and key words, but we had to turn it off again as no buying action to speak of.
So now we are tracking conversion of “buy clicks” to successful upsells to the ebook / paperback / 30 day free trial bundle.
We have also started what is called A/B split testing of headlines on the sales page, also split testing the headlines on the One Time Offer page, but the beauty of Google Optimiser is that you can test unlimited amounts of variables and it still - somehow - is able to tell you which of the multitude of variables is the most successful.
Tricky to get your head round initially, all this stuff, but it was very simple to implement - with Steve’s help - and I’m completely gripped!
I feel like I have just ascended to a whole new level of geekiness.
