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Conversion: the high art of design
Last week we ran some Google Ads for certain files on tradebit. We spent around 500 US$ to drive traffic to manuals and sound effects as a test. We wanted to find out, how much a paid visit is actually worth and we learned that our pages are not yet converting as good as we want them! The sales cost us around 8US$ per buyer and the average sale was around 15 US$. That is too expensive to make sense! So our conversion rate is not good enough yet.
There are numerous postings out there, covering the same topic and some reveal simple and logical views on conversions. The next weeks will bring some new design tweaks and some new pages to tradebit. We also want to implement some A/B testing of the landing pages to improve the user experience. After 13 years in the business I believe that simple still rules. So we will try to simplify our pages and streamline the design again - towards readability and fast loading.
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:07 am
Thanks for the mention
I agree with you re: the “KISS” rule.
Traffic is a HUGE issue for conversion tracking though… It’s really a must-have if you want any traction from any sort of testing.
Good luck with the optimisation!
May 4th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Hi Ralf,
One thing to consider is that sound effects are very subjective, so may not yield accurate conversion rate data. For example, if someone is looking for an explosion sound effect, they may well find a file on sale at Tradebit and click through to listen to a preview. But whether they purchase that file will depend on whether that particular recording fits their requirements. Is it loud enough, big enough, clear enough, the right price etc? Whereas a known quantity which is the same everywhere, such as an ipod, WILL give an accurate conversation rate because the only variable is the website’s search engine visibility, page layout etc - not the item itself.
In my experience of selling sound effects outside of Tradebit, roughly 1 in 200 hits leads to a sale. But I have no idea what the hit rates are at Tradebit because we are not shown these details. With regards to the current pages, I think the code is unnecessary and makes pages look messy. How many people want to embed details of a pdf manual on their myspace site? Great for music but not all products. I think it would also be good if there was a direct link to each publisher’s sub-domain. There is currently only a ‘contact seller’ link, but some people may want to browse a particular publisher’s products only, and this is currently difficult to do.
Ralf, can I ask what is happening to the description field? I tried to edit a page earlier but the wysiwyg editor had gone and the description contained HTML code which I had to remove. This could be very time consuming and I really hope you will not affect the description text when you make future page changes.
Anyway, good luck with everything, the transition has been much smoother than I thought so well done!
Cheers
Leigh
May 5th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
well, we had some serious problems with that WYSIWYG editor and switched it back offline… we CAN activate it per merchant now