By Christine Blank
YLighting, a light fixture e-tailer in Marina del Rey, CA, boosted conversions from visitors to buyers on its Web site 58 percent by improving ad creatives and landing pages from search engines. The site simultaneously raised revenue 168 percent when it tested various ads and landing pages late last year.
YLighting tested ad creatives, running one against the other simultaneously via testing tools from Offermatica, San Francisco. Offermatica provides A/B testing, which involves splitting site visitors into two groups and tracking conversions, and multivariate creative testing, which lets e-commerce firms analyze many variables at once.
One YLighting ad test included a comparison between creative with modern light fixtures and people and another that was a typical product page featuring various pendant light fixtures. The “Beautiful Lights Plus People” ad performed 158 percent better than the product page.
“People want to see interesting things, even if they want to buy normal things,” YLighting president Jeff Zwelling said. “To show them our top 10 best sellers wasn’t going to be as effective for converting than if we showed them 10 things that are very interesting, but they still bought one of those best sellers.”
Zwelling said YLighting needed a more scientific approach to creating ads for its site and search marketing efforts. In the past, executives in marketing and others basically proposed a round of different ad ideas, then ran them one by one.
“Whichever one became the biggest, whichever one converted at the higher rate, we would keep,” he said. “We had to use something more precise. There were not enough conversions.”
Zwelling plans to test the company’s tagline: “High Design, Low Prices.” It will test various other taglines such as “Your Source for Modern Light,” determine the most effective tagline and change that throughout its online and offline marketing.
Carrot Ink, Addison, TX, a printer cartridge supplier, is another company that has benefited from the creative testing from Offermatica as well as Web analytics firm Coremetrics, San Mateo, CA. Carrot Ink tested 81 combinations of four key elements on its home page to find the best combination of promotions and copy.
“This made a huge impact,” Carrot Ink founder/CEO John Howard said. “We saw an almost 20 percent lift in conversions by making one simple change to the call to action on our main navigation zone.”
