Improving conversion #1: The five second test evaluated
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009Yesterday we launched the new kwandwereserve.com website. It features the Kwandwe safari lodges owned and operated by our client &Beyond. The purpose of the site is to generate qualified leads for the business.
As a result converting visits to enquiries is of critical importance to them.
Priority placement and prominence of the various elements on a landing page plays an important role in the conversion success of a website. A good landing page helps visitors differentiate quickly what the next step to their goal is. It should guide them effectively to the required information.
We came across a free tool recently that helps you evaluate what the most prominent items on your landing page are. It is called the fivesecondtest.
The free version of the tool lets you run two types of tests on 15 people each:
1. Memory test – what are the five things people remember when they see your page for 5 seconds?
2. Click test – what do they click on if they have only 5 seconds?
Finding:
In our opinion the memory test provides a good indication of what catches the eye when a page is scanned. The results from the Kwandwereserve.com test highlighted that the top utility links to the greater &Beyond sites (Africa and India) are potentially too prominent compared to the main navigation. We also noted that the word LODGE wasn’t mentioned which is the primary focus of the site.
However for the click test we would hesitate to respond to the results in isolation. Five seconds isn’t enough time to read the navigational options and therefore the majority of clicks would be on images. Also the clicks for this test aren’t carried out with a particular task in mind which actually renders the results meaningless. The memory test provides qualitative information which works better with the small sample size.
The next step in our conversion optimisation process is to monitor the analytics for real user behaviour from the landing page. We’ll cover our findings in the next post: Improving conversion #2