With the ever increasing pressure on marketing budgets and the demands of senior management to prove return on investment for digital developments, it is essential that suitable measurement tools are in place. We’ve recently started using the Google Website Optimizer tool which totally eliminates the guess work in demonstrating the success of digital developments. The tool is free to use and simple to implement which makes it the perfect way to prove ROI.

We’ve recently carried out a project for one of our ecommerce clients to increase the browse-to-buy conversion rate of their site. We noticed from their web stats that they had a number of users dropping out between the basket and confirmation page which insinuates that some highly qualified traffic (i.e. users that put something in their basket) were struggling with some elements within the checkout process.

Our solution was to redesign and streamline the checkout process focusing on minimal data capture and removing the need to register before making a purchase.  The development created a modern checkout process that validates user data on the fly and provides feedback as the user fills in each field. Also the confirmation page and help sections were enhanced significantly.

Using Google Website Optimizer we observed in the 5 days post launch that the new checkout outperformed the old one by 15.7%, which represented a significant increase in the site turnover. We had to run the test for 5 days to ensure that we had a robust data set around 200+ purchases through each checkout. This tool completely eliminated any guess work in the performance of the new checkout and allowed our client to do some great internal PR on success of the site.