NB: This is a guest article by Wayne Morris, UK general manager at Maxymiser.
Travel is about choice. Where do you want to go today? What kind of experience do you want? Who do you want to take with you?
When you manifest this online, the result is endless permutations of customers each looking to get something different out of your travel site.
Your challenge is to make every one of your online visitors feel like your site has been created specifically for them. But how?
Many travel brands are already ticking boxes such as re-design, usability and heat map analysis, and introducing elements to attract attention, like carousels.
But this is only really the start of your website optimisation journey.
It’s time to move on from subjective decision-making. To understand the real behaviour of your visitors, why they click through and ultimately what influences their purchase decision, testing in a live environment is critical.
Put it to the test
Did you know that you already have the biggest and most accurate focus group running continuously in the background?
Your thousands, or even millions, of website visitors are already providing feedback on your website based on real-world actions.
This live data gained from actual visitor behaviour is the key to objective, informed decision-making. A/B testing should be your first step for some basic, yet powerful insights.
For example:
- Does adding an icon attract more visitors to click on a money-saving deal?
- Will inserting a light box reminding visitors they can add “extras” into their basket mean they buy more in-flight meals or travel insurance?
Multivariate testing takes this one stage further, by serving up multiple variants of content, design and structure, so you can be confident you know the design/content/layout combinations that will drive the greatest clickthroughs, booking values and overall sales.
Small changes, big impact
Whether you are offering package holidays, accommodation, cruises and ferry tours, or train tickets, your business drivers will be almost identical – driving conversion rates upwards.
And A/B and multivariate testing offers the key to understanding the basic changes that can have huge impact on uplift, delivering the data to prove it from live online interactions.
By optimising a simple call to action, for example, a flight operator has increased the sale of added-value items such as travel insurance and fast track boarding; and switching the order of different pricing on a ferry company’s website has boosted booking values of higher priced fares that offer additional benefits.
Website optimisation is a journey that can lead to segmentation and personalisation to provide the optimum customer experience.
But it’s one that only really starts when subjectivity and guesswork are replaced with content decisions based on actual real-life data from your customers.
A/B and multivariate testing is a powerful way to embark on a strategic approach to iterating the user experience of your website, where the impact of sometimes simple changes to colour, content, message and design can be measured and acted upon with confidence.
Your customers won’t book a flight, holiday or hotel room without considering it carefully and getting all the facts.
Make it easy for them to buy from your brand by letting them choose the optimum look and feel of your website, rather than trusting your gut-feel.
In return, your customer engagement will increase significantly – and so will your conversion rates.
NB: This is a guest article by Wayne Morris, UK general manager at Maxymiser.
NB2: Basket-stopwatch-mouse and tick-cross images via Shutterstock.
Related posts:
About Special Nodes
Here’s a couple of tools to look into for those interested in doing split testing.
- Google Analytic’s new “Content Experiments” tool seems like a nice free option to use to do split testing.
- KISS Metrics has some very nice funnel and cohort reports that can give you great insights into what your site is doing. Rather pricey if you have a decent amount of traffic like we do, but still cheaper than trying to set it all up internally. And for a lot of data it seems more reliable than GA which tends to revert to estimations when the numbers are too large.
Thanks for the article Wayne. On this point:
“Many travel brands are already ticking boxes such as …. introducing elements to attract attention, like carousels.”
Have you AB tested this? My experience is carousels perform very poorly….
You make a very good point. I’ve seen carousels test very badly on travel sites and also on blogs/news sites as well. Generally sites put them on the homepage and users either haven’t the attention to wait for them to transition or they often don’t know how to use them.
Given that a decent proportion of the online travel audience is not particularly web savvy, interactions like carousels are not always advisable and often a sinple table of prices, details, icons, links will often work/convert much better.
At L9 we have been offering behavior based dynamic site content delivery to our credit union customers for the past two years. Tracking site visitor click action and using triggers presents different relevant content to each individual. Both content and triggers can be set by the site manager using the content management tool provided. More details on how this works at http://goo.gl/KRK7f
This is a great piece – and I’m an advocate that other businesses should use this method to gain insights on all the real-world actions that take place on their sites and use it to create an even better experience for their users. With the right metrics, they can build better products based on what their users behaviors and not what they think their users need: http://ow.ly/bpVFv – a great study on behavioral triggers.
In a bigger picture, from these actions you can learn about the user engagement with the site and app.
Guy Nirpaz
Founder of Totango.com
More detailed view on A/B tests: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_abtesting/all/1