Testing CTR and Landing Page Optimizations

When it comes to conversion rates, SEO, CTR, and everything else to do with optimizing the revenue and traffic to a website we all like to talk about testing variations.

We look at testing landing page layouts, color on adsense ads, various SEO methods and then we analyze and then test again, and again, and again, and again.

That is great, we have to do that, on a high traffic site a 1 percent difference in CTR can make a big difference in revenue so every tweak can make a big difference, make sure you track the changes you make though and see what the results were.

I recently did this on a high traffic site of mine, it is a site that has had a very predictable CTR and RPC for over a year. To me this is the easiest site to test on sense any change you make can be compared to a long track record, if you have only had a site up for a month it is hard to compare any test data against a long term trend.

But after I tried my first test I did not get any meaningful results, so I tested again (all theme layouts targeted at getting higher CTR) and then I tested again. My last two tests actually dropped CTR compared to the long term trend.

What is interesting about that drop in CTR was that the themes I tried were actually very high performers on other sites, literally got 3 times the CTR than the theme I was using on the site I was testing, but when I used them on the test site the CTR dropped. Wow.

So, whats the moral to the story, test and test again but in many cases the grass is not greener on the other side.