Omniture Articles

Think ‘Evolutionary,’ Not Revolutionary, With Site Re-Designs

“On that fateful Tuesday morning, a big switch was flipped, and if we were lucky things improved.”

That’s how the ecommerce marketing manager for a large online retailer described the company's old approach to site redesign: they’d spend a month deciding what to change, all the ideas would go into a pile, the site would be designed, and then all at once, on a single morning -- ta-dah! -- a brand new site would be launched, while everyone involved would watch and pray.

Today, the retailer has found a better way, based on using a more gradual -- and more effective -- approach. Now, the ecommerce team takes those ideas for change and tests them one by one, finding and then implementing winners, so that the site goes through an evolutionary change. And already, they have learned much about consumer behavior that will forever impact future site changes and the bottom line.

For example, the company has found that the biggest lifts come from tests that happen closer to checkout, which indicates customers pay more attention to a site the closer they get to their wallets. The company has found that changes to font and text color do not make much of a difference, meaning that customers tend to notice details less than marketers think. And, they have found that changes they were certain would improve conversions actually do the opposite.

Those realizations have big revenue impact for the company: first, the negative changes (ones they normally would have included during an overall site redesign) have not been implemented, so they have already neutralized some revenue detractors. And second, knowing that minor changes are less effective, they are confidently able to test more dramatic changes than ever, knowing they can stop wasting time on details that don’t matter.

Overall, the company’s original, revolutionary site redesigns, though, had been successful, always boosting conversions and revenue. So why fiddle with something that already worked?

Because the revolutionary approach (a drastic change happening all at once), though used almost universally by web marketers, contains two inherent problems:

1. There is no way of telling which changes work and which don’t.

“Among the million changes we made, some were good and some were not as good,” says the ecommerce marketing manager. The not-as-good changes, then -- those that hurt conversions rather than boosting them -- cancelled out some of the good changes.

2. Marketers run the risk of scaring off loyal customers with a brand new look.

Thousands of marketers are familiar with the sinking feeling as they watch sinking conversions following a relaunch. But even the luckier marketers, who net higher results with the redesign, are missing out on potentially large streams of revenue.

But companies such as this one that are willing to use an evolutionary method of site redesign can reap the rewards of a relaunch without inviting a crazy amount of risk, simply by testing one change at a time, slowly yet perceptively improving how the site works.

This method can also help justify and validate a web marketer’s very existence as far as redesign. “There might not be that much excitement internally about change in the design of shipping options,” the ecommerce marketing manager points out. “But if you can show a two percent lift in conversions, and that’s two million dollars a year, and you don’t have to acquire new customers, that’s free money.”