Often times we get too close to our products and marketing message and we become complacent. Coming up with more test hypotheses can become increasingly difficult. Today we are going to look at a few ways to come up with more test hypotheses.
More Test Hypotheses Create More Opportunity For Improvement
Obviously we know the more we test the more we learn and the more opportunity it creates for improvement.
But you may have seemingly tested everything and are wondering how to come up with new ideas to test.
Here are a few ideas on how to accomplish this…
1. Use heatmaps
Heatmaps can be a great resource to create hypotheses. This allows us a first-hand look at what your visitors are paying the most attention to and what is being overlooked on your site.
You can leverage this data to create new ideas to test. For example, you have a video on your landing page but after looking at the heatmap data you find out that nobody is clicking on the video or even paying attention to it at all.
You may test out things such as placement of the video, size of the video, or having it auto-play or not.
Another opportunity from this data could be that the majority of visitors seem to be clicking on one particular image on your landing page. You may test having the image link to a particular call to action instead of being a static image.
This is just scratching the surface on what is possible once you have this type of data.
2. Small hinges
If you have been following our blog for any period of time you know that even the smallest changes can yield big improvements. You don’t always need BIG changes or page re-designs to achieve improvements. The way to do that is by testing small hinges.
Small hinges stem from the following quote: “Big doors swing on small hinges. ~W. Clement Stone
This basically means that the little things matter. Here are a few examples of small hinges when looking to create more test hypotheses.
Headline
Call To Action
Button Color
Button Text
Menu Bar vs. Not
Menu bar items
Phone number at the top vs not
Form fields
Images
Testimonials
Secure Badges
Video vs. No Video
Long text vs. short
Placement of call to action
Bullets vs paragraphs
Basically any individual element on a page can be considered a small hinge.
Don’t just assume it is too small of a change to be worth it. You may be surprised at the results as we often are. The more tests you can run the more you learn.
3. Re-test
Markets are constantly evolving and so should your marketing efforts. One thing you can do to continue testing is go back to previous experiments you have performed more than 6 months ago and re-test them. Add variations to it. Pay particularly close attention to variations from old tests that showed promise but didn’t ultimately end up the winning variation.
Again you may be surprised. Visitors may react differently to the message now than they did 6 months ago.
4. Get more eyes on it
Like was said at the beginning, we often get too close to our products and message and that leaves us complacent. A good way to overcome this and test more is to get a fresh set of eyes on your pages and campaigns. We do this all the time for clients and is one of the biggest reasons they hire us.
A fresh set of eyes, ones with expertise in optimization, can help you discover areas you may have overlooked and even elements you may not have even thought of.
We hope this gives you some good ideas as to some way to come up with more test hypotheses.
Be sure to like, comment, share and subscribe if you found this information useful.
If you want a second set of eyes on your campaigns, be sure to reach out to schedule your no-obligation conversion acceleration session. We often find 3-5 things you can test right away during these sessions to help you improve your results.