Reasons to perform usability testing

The goal of every business that’s online is to gain more exposure and therefore more profits. This is usually achieved by gaining traffic and acquiring leads or customers. However, many of these companies pay little attention to how well their website is achieving their business’ goals.

Imagine a shopkeeper opened up food market, and spent a fortune on a nice marketing campaign and a great looking storefront sign. That sounds great! However, what if the shopkeeper never takes the time to ask people in the store “how was your shopping experience?” What if he never changes the look of an aisle, or rearranges the products to better fit consumer needs?

The assumption is that his store, or in your case, your site, is working. By not testing, or asking your customers how they feel, you’ll never really know whether your website is truly doing the best for you that it can.

A few years ago, developers avoided A/B testing due to price and resources needed. It was too expensive to hire a usability company to host focus groups and gather customer information. Doing the work yourself would mean hours and hours of research. That’s the past, and things are different. Regardless of the size of your budget, you can perform valuable testing on your website and optimize for online success rate with much lower cost and time. Over the past few years, numerous tools have risen that provide webmasters with a vast amount of information that once cost a small fortune to obtain. These tools include:

Google Analytics is a free user tracking tool that will give you valuable insight on how people navigate your site. It tracks what pages they visit, how long they stay on each page, and even whether they achieved one of your desired goals (ex. Purchase an item, or sign up for a newsletter). Google Analytics acts like a surveillance camera at a store, tracking what everyone is doing. By simply installing a small snippet of code on each page of your site, you can begin tracking today for free.

Woopra Analytics is a relatively inexpensive service that gives you further insight to how people are navigating your website. This service allows you to visually track visitor actions in real time. It serves as a supercharged version of Google Analytics by providing you information as visitors are on your site. In addition, it allows you to live chat with visitors, in order to gain further insight by communicating with your potential clients.

Google Website Optimizer is another great free tool that lets you create A/B tests on your website. Simply install a snippet of code around a section of your website you want to ‘test’, and you can show visitors different variations of that section and then see which works best in achieving your goal. The tool uses statistical algorithms and tracking code to give you the best variation to use. You can test individual sections of your site (ex. your header) or entire pages.

For more information about these products, and how we use them to achieve success for our clients, contact Motoza Marketing or call us toll-free at 1-855-9-MOTOZA.