Recently one of my colleagues asked me about the different types of conversion optimization tests that are possible. I started to explain the differences between A/B and multivariate testing, but he quickly stopped me. That was not what he wanted to know.

What he WANTED was to learn about the different types of things that could be tested on a specific web page or process. Some simple examples of this are: testing the hero image, testing the button or even testing entire redesigns. I think this is a question at least a few people out there have, so this post contains a list of different tests types along with pros and cons that may exist.

• Redesign Tests
  In a redesign test everything is fair game and can be changed. You can change, move, remove and add whatever your heart desires in the name of making the page better.

• Pros: Redesign tests are great for when you have something that you know is a bad experience and need to try something completely different. At that point having incremental optimization is not going to cut it. To paraphrase one of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, sometimes what you need is to start over, not to optimize something that is bad. You could be climbing up a short hill and be completely missing the giant mountain next to you (Yahoo vs. Google is a perfect example of this).

• Cons: When you change too many things at once, it’s practically impossible to learn what helped or hurt your page. You may have used a new hero image that increased conversion by 10%, but changed an important description that decreased conversion by 15%. Since you changed both at once, all you would know is that you had a decrease in conversion of 5%, which would cause you to disregard an awesome hero image. Redesigns can be great when done right, but you will give up a lot of learning and they should be used sparingly.

• Tip: If you are going to do a redesign, make sure you maximize this opportunity by doing a lot of due diligence in understanding what your visitors want. Don’t just assume that you can think like a visitor. A lot is on the line and you should make the most of all the work you are doing. Take the time to really dive into your web analytics, do usability testing, read surveys and go through use cases.

• Description Tests
  Words matter, A LOT. Changing what you say in a page title, photo caption, call to action or product description can have dramatic effects with practically no creative assets needed.

• Pros: Description tests are a great way to incrementally improve a page that you don’t think is that bad. Additionally, since most of these tests involve testing some kind of html text, you aren’t likely to need a designer. They are also pretty easy to implement because changing text usually isn’t too technically complicated.

• Cons: A lot of the time, people don’t take the time to read on the Internet, therefore a common occurrence with description tests is that you may see no conversion difference. In order to make an impact, you need to make sure that you are testing descriptions that people are actually reading.

• Tip: Look through your web analytics to identify any keywords that may drive significant traffic to your page or look through your own internal search from that page to identify any popular keywords. You are more likely to get visitors’ attention if you use keywords or phrases that you know people are interested in.

• Promotional Tests
  In promotional tests you can experiment with different prices, promotions and the way you position promotions to determine what visitors respond to most and how much they respond.

• Pros: Promotional tests can be very useful in determining an optimal price for your products and how to best position promotions. It gives you the freedom to try promotions on a sample population and ensure that you offer only the most effective one to the entire population.

• Cons: Promotional tests where you offer discounts can be trickier to interpret. In most cases, larger discounts create higher conversion rates, but if your discounts are larger than your conversion increases, you may start eating into your profits. It takes a little more sophisticated monitoring and analysis to ensure that you are making a good business decision.Additionally, you can really upset your potential customers if you’re not careful. Be wary of offering different pricing to different people. Some big companies have received a lot of bad PR for these types of tactics.

• Tip: Try providing the same discounts to everyone, but positioning it differently in your test variations. You may find that your customers respond more to a percentage discount (e.g. 25% off) compared to a flat dollar discount (e.g. get $50 off $200). Or it’s possible that visitors are insensitive to $9.99 off, but are more likely to convert if you offer $10 off.

• Image Tests
  Sometimes just using a different image on your page can make big differences. If you’re a vacation-planning site, lifestyle images of people having fun may work better than a nice shot of the beach. On the other hand, if you’re selling furniture, visitors may want to see the piece of furniture by itself.

• Pros: I think all tests can be fun, but these tend to be easy and fun. Imagery is something that people actually pay attention to and sometimes the right image can really move the needle in right direction.

• Cons: I can’t really think of any cons to image testing. But if you can, please comment!

• Tip: Many times less is more. If you have a page with 3 smaller images, try testing one bigger image that makes an impact. When there are too many things competing for your attention, nothing stands out.

• Design Tests
  This is where you try to optimize by testing color, fonts types and sizes, shapes or spacing. These are very popular among design-centric brands.

• Pros: Design-oriented tests not only can help in improve your conversion, they also can allow you to test different design prototypes to ensure they don’t hurt conversion before you release them to the world. Remember that avoiding the implementation of something that hurts conversion is probably more important than finding something that improves conversion.

• Cons: Design oriented tests usually require help from a designer, which can make them more resource intensive. Additionally, it can be hard to find evidence to support that changing things like button color or increasing font size are likely to increase conversion, so you’re sometimes left with creating less data-driven test variations.

• Targeting Tests 
  Many will say that targeting is not the same as testing. I agree, but you can test your targeting approach to ensure you are being as effective as you can be. For example, you may be targeting based on a referring keyword, but conversion rate may be higher if you targeted based on a visitors being Mac users.

• Pros: Targeting tests can really help you capture hard to reach customers by fine-tuning your personalization tactics. These types of tests are the next level once you have harvested all the low hanging fruit with your other testing

• Cons: Testing different targeting tactics is not as straightforward as testing visual items and requires a pretty deep understanding of your visitors. You will also need to invest in a tool that allows you to target because free tools such as Google Analytics Experiments do not do this.

• Tip: For the most part don’t listen to anyone that says they tried targeting and it doesn’t work. Except for rare situations, targeting will help increase conversion if you find a recipe that resonates with users. Like I mentioned in the cons section, good targeting requires a deep understanding of your visitors, but when you figure it out you can really provide a great experience and improve conversion.

These are some of the more popular types of tests, but it is probably not an exhaustive list. I welcome any of my fellow testing practitioners to add to it or provide their own perspective.