Websites have 2 core assets: content and navigation. While content marketers obsess over their content, they rarely think about their website navigation. This is madness. Since website navigation is the single-most-clicked asset for any website, failing to provide in the right website navigation is like flushing money down the toilet.
Let’s Stop the Madness and Test Our Website Navigation
Website navigation optimization – Getting website navigation right can be complicated. Looking only at historical data does not help, because website visitors typically go where the navigation takes them – so if your current “anchor position” navigation (the top left element of your website navigation) accounts for a high number of conversions, that is simply because you are driving the most visitors to that page. What we need to do is AB test what happens when we send 50% of the website traffic to one page and 50% to another, measuring both which links get clicked more and also which visited pages drive more conversions. This process of driving traffic to different experiences and measuring the performance differences is called AB Testing.
3 Website Navigation Tests You Start Today
AB Test with Boosters
Boosters, or floating “next page” recommendations, are the easiest way to get started. Just create an account at www.payboard.com, drop the script in the footer of your site, customize the design of your booster, and BAM! you are ready to start learning what pages are most effective at driving clicks and conversions. Payboard will run these experiments for you, and provide updates every week about your AB Tests: which tests are winning, and which tests to retire. Once you see a significant trend, you can decide to update your static navigation with some fresh, high-performing pages that your visitors need to convert.
AB Test a Widget
If you do not want a floating booster on your page, you can also use an “inline booster” that is anchored in the sidebar of your WordPress site. This is a two-step process (assuming that you already have the Payboard script added to the footer of your site): 1) add a “Text” widget to your sidebar (Appearance > Widgets > drag Text to Sidebar); and 2) paste the HTML below into the input box labeled “Content” and hit Save.
<a href=”/”>Visit Our Home Page</a>
Other than including the payboardInlineBooster class, this is just standard HTML, so you can add whatever formatting you want, point to whatever default destination you want, etc. Whenever the page is pulled up, Payboard will replace the destination and the anchor text with one of your other pages, and then measure which of your pages, when recommended, performs best from a clicks and clicked conversions perspective.
AB Test Top Navigation
The most important element on your website is your “anchor position” navigation – the top-left navigation element on your website. Let’s start there. Sure, you can do tests on any navigation element (e.g., the middle bottom, clicked .001% of the time), but your goal here is to learn what works at getting your visitors to click and convert, so let’s be bold!
In WordPress, go to Appearance > Menus, and expand the top left navigation item so that you can add “payboardInlineBooster” in the CSS Classes (optional) box. Hit “Save Menu” and you should see your navigation update immediately.
If you apply each of these elements, you can expect that 10% of your visitors will end up clicking on one of your tests, and you will learn faster about which of your content assets perform than if you only use one technique.
Above, the top navigation encourages visitors to start a 30-day free trial, and below the top navigation encourages visitors to read about success stories.
Start AB Testing Today. More Customers Will Thank You Tomorrow!
AB Testing does take time to deliver value, but if you stick with it you will learn what your website needs to do to help visitors convert. If do not have the time or the available talent to implement your own AB Testing strategy, you can hire a content marketing firm like Advaiya to help you map out your testing strategy and get you moving in the right direction. Advaiya’s xBOM is a set of neatly packaged content offerings built to help you succeed. These offerings cover common scenarios – product and service launches, sales force training, partner enablement, and much, much more.
The overall beauty of Website Navigation Optimization AB Testing is that the insights you gain will not only bump your conversion rates in the short-term, but help you understand more about your customers’ needs – and these insights are what will take your business to the next level over time.
