 My name is Alice Weisbeck and I'm here to be the first speaker of the day. His name is Chris Tuttle. He's been working with WordPress for the past six years and he's also been teaching WordPress. He's a freelancer and he's going to talk to us today about experimenting with designs. So please build on this, Chris Tuttle. Tell me how to use this, so let's see how this works. Alright, are we on? Alright, this is where it's usually taped to your face. Alright, first of all, I just want to get to know you guys a little bit. How many of you are designers? Beautiful hands there, alright. How many of you are brand new to WordPress? Just getting started. Love it. You guys are my people. I love you. Let's see here. How many of you have been doing WordPress ever since it started? Fantastic. Alright, I'll see you guys at the ones I get to watch out for. Awesome. Well you guys are amazing and I'm really excited to share some of the things I've been doing and learning with design. Okay, so a little bit about me. Actually, first of all, I want to thank everybody for coming out to WordCamp and I want to give a shout out to all the organizers. They really and all the volunteers, they do a lot to put together these camps and it's just phenomenal to be a part of this and to see what they do. In opening remarks, he mentioned that this is the real life community. It is. This is one of the best parts about WordPress is getting out and seeing the faces and being a part of that community and helping those around you and lifting them up. That's really where I came from, is the community. Without the WordPress community, I would not be where I am today or know anything that I know today. I grew up in construction and decided that I was done with construction and wanted to see my family. Well, the ultimate goal was to be able to work from home and be with them, which is finally a dream that has come true. So I'm pretty excited about that. But, yes, I love construction and I've always done stuff with computers and decided to jump into computers and actually got a job at Bluehost, so Bluehost I like them. Anyways, from there I learned about WordPress and now I'm here and it's a blast. Okay, so we're all here because we design websites, we build websites, we do stuff with WordPress and websites, right? A lot goes into building a website. We have design, we have copy. I've overheard a few of you talking, some of you are content writers. I really look up to you people. I have no idea how you do what you do. Writing is not my forte. There's a lot of imagery, there's branding, there's storytelling. And then we jump into things like calls to action, sales funds, contact forms, typography, UI. A lot of work goes into building amazing websites. Within that we have a little equation. So we have our audience. Our audience plus your design and your website. Our ultimate goal is to get conversions. So a lot of what we're talking about today is how to increase your conversions. Okay? So what's a conversion? That's the big question, right? Oh, and I'm sorry, if anybody has a question as we're going, if you didn't hear me or you just need me to repeat something, anything like that, I'm happy to answer questions as we go. I'll also have a Q&A at the end. So conversions. Really the conversion can be pretty much anything you want it to be. You are in 100% control of what you consider to be a conversion. It's your metric. Basically, it's getting your audience and customers to do what you want them to do. That's what a conversion is. You're giving your way. I like to get my way. So I like conversions. Your website goals, basically they turn into conversions, right? The whole reason that you're building your website is to be able to make something happen. Okay? For instance, maybe you want them to call you. Maybe you want your audience to buy a product. Sign up for something. Fill out a form. There's all kinds of fun things you can do on website trade. So really, you need to know your audience. You know who's coming to the site? Where they're going on the site. How long they're staying? Keeping them from doing what you want them to do. So a project I worked on recently was an online mental health counseling. And their main goal was to get somebody to sign up for a free session. You wouldn't think that would be too hard. It's a free session. People like free things. The main problem was there was a 30 question form that they had to fill out before they could schedule that for a session. That doesn't work. How many questions do you think people got through before they just abandoned everything? It was five. They made it to five. Part of the problem was they had this timeline. And it showed how far you were along the process. So obviously that was one of the first things that we decided was going to be the change. So knowing your audience is really important. And this is where the fun and kind of why we're here. AB testing or split testing? AB testing and split testing. This is one of my favorite parts about design. Because you get to test what you're doing to see if it's really working. I like that. I like being critiqued. I like learning and growing. And that's really what AB testing and split testing is, is you're allowing your audience to critique your work. I don't know if that makes sense. Anyways, okay. So AB testing and split testing. This is basically what it is. So you can granule form. You have your audience. You take your audience and you split it up into two groups. Your first group is your control. You have your members, science class, your controls, and your variables for the test you're doing. So our first group, we're going to send to our control, which is our page as it is. And our second group, we're going to send to our test page. Now this is our variable or our challenger, as I have it written there. So you can see we've made some changes. You know, what looks to be like a call to action or something down there. But we've determined what our conversion is, and now we have the opportunity to validate any changes or additions that we've made to the page to improve what we think is going to improve the conversion. A lot of you know this already. This process, even though it looks very simple, it can get very confusing. So I like to use a little bit of a framework to really provide some structure and to help kind of lay out the steps needed to really make AB testing work for you. I'll bust along these so you can write them down if you want to. So the first step, we're going to measure. The second step is we're going to prioritize. The first step comes to the fun at the testing. Alright, we're scooting. We're sitting on a fence. We fell off. It was a left. We repeat. We do it again. Keep doing it. Okay, so let's break down measure. Okay, first is defining our objectives. Now, a lot of this stuff we probably should have done as we were organizing the site and putting the site together. For those of you that are freelancers and network on sites that have already been put together, you'll know that this doesn't happen in other professions. So the first thing we need to do is we need to come up with our objectives. Why does your website exist? I like to use the dumb principle on this one. Objective should be dumb to UMB. Do-able, understandable, manageable, and beneficial. We have our goals. What needs to change to meet our objectives? So what do we need to change on the site to meet those objectives? Those are our goals. Now we're going to jump into KBI's key performance indicators. For those of you that enjoy number crunching, this is for you. This is the numbers. So basically, you convert your objectives and your goals and you create numbers for them. So for instance, with that form, we needed to fill out the 30 question form, and KBI on that was we wanted people to sign up and actually hit that button and make the appointment. So that was our most important KBI. That appointment. And then we needed to find our target for every KBI that we have. So we need to put a target number on that. Does that make sense? Not yet. All right. So that's a measure. We need to be able to have something we can hit. Next is prioritize. This is where we jump into things like Google Analytics. Google Analytics is incredibly fun to use. It is, I hear everybody laughing. I'm a dad and a nerd. Because that tells you a lot about who I am. Yeah, I actually, believe it or not, enjoy Google Analytics. I'm not the world's best at it, but I love it. It's fun to get in there and tweak and play with things. So we want to use Google Analytics to help us decide what we're going to test. I really recommend looking for the low hanging fruit. So things that we can grab quick and easy that refer to our important KPIs. Like for instance, we need to know with Google Analytics where our traffic is going. What's the balance rate on page? Where is your traffic not going? Are they even going where you want them to go? Some of the ways we can do this is by making sure that we're looking at our entry pages, which are also our landing pages. If we go into the content section in Google Analytics, we can actually find out where people are landing and how long they're staying there. Then we want to take a look at our exit pages. So are they actually, when they do finally convert, what are they doing after that? So as we're going through this process, just know that the more traffic you get to the page, the quicker you're going to be able to find results in the tests. And using Google Analytics, if you're deciding between two pages to test, really it's going to come down to return on investment. Which one is going to be more beneficial and worth your return on your time? Because that's what really everything boils down to. Okay, so this is the fun part, the actual testing. First thing we want to do is we want to form a clear hypothesis for your test. For example, the problem is people aren't signing up for the newsletter. Surprise. So the hypothesis is the visitors don't see the value in the newsletter. Okay, so the hypothesis is value. Why does it matter if I sign up for the newsletter? It's just going to crowd my email box. So the idea is to educate. He's a little copy and toss in a couple bullet points to help educate and develop value. And so then we're going to test it. And this is A-B testing. So we have our website. We're going to test a piece of this website to see if we can get people to find value in that by adding these bullet points. And we're going to test it. Once we test it, we're going to measure the data. When you're looking at data, don't forget to look at revenue as well when you're testing. A lot of times I say that you're testing price. A lot of times if you raise the price, you'll see lower conversions. So you'll think, well, what's going on here? That doesn't make sense. If you raise the price, you're not going to get as many people buying it. But if you look at the revenue in the end, you very well could be making more, even with fewer conversions. So always make sure that you check them just to make sure. And you do it again. What's the new thing? You keep doing it until your user experience and everything is just cherry. But you'll always keep doing it because it's fun. Did I see it? Okay, sorry. All right. You want to learn from your tests. And you want to do it again. Okay. Considerations. These are some fun things. Google does not like duplicate content. Okay. So if you leave up content for too long, it's going to hurt your SEO. The general rule is to really update your site with the winning validation as soon as you are sure of the success of the test. So when your test wins, update it. Put it up there. That's the new thing. I worked for a company called Modem Marketplace where I helped build an education service. And it was funny because sales off of the site, the organic sales, were doing too hot. And so we did some heavy testing on some landing pages. And within one day, we found that the new landing page brought in a good 30% to 40% increase. And so very quickly, that became the new landing page for that service. And it was really fun to see the organic sales just explode after that. So it can happen very quickly. Like we said before, the amount of traffic to that site or to that page really can help determine the length that you have that test running. So don't run your experiments longer than you need. And use canonical URLs. For me, I had no clue what that work was even just a couple of years ago. So let's talk about them real quick because they're very important. Let's assume you have two versions of the same page. So exactly 100% the same content. They only differ in the fact that there are several sections of your site. And because of the background color and an active menu, it's a little bit different. That's it. Both versions have been linked from other sites. The content itself is clearly valuable. Which version should the search engine show? It doesn't know. Okay? So what you need to do is you need to tell which one to look at. And this will help your SEO at the time. So what we're going to do is in the head, we're going to put this in. So basically, our link, this needs to go in exactly as it is here. And then we have our URL to the page. Can I contribute something, Chris? Please. Yeah, as an SEO expert, I would actually, for like a group like this, I would suggest a plugin, an A.B. testing plugin, and then actually getting into the canonicalization and figuring out which one needs to be indexed or not. Because it's on the technical SEO level. And I would suggest like an A.B. testing plugin that manages all that, all the technical side. Absolutely. I definitely agree with you. Absolutely. Just to finish up, I agree with you completely. There are a lot of great plugins out there. And you don't have to do it this exact way, obviously. There's a lot of different ways you can do all of this. This right here is Yoast, you use Yoast. Very easily you can type in the canonical URL right there. But yes, absolutely plugins are absolutely phenomenal. If you would like to learn more about canonical URLs, and I love that you're a SEO guru. I'm working on that one myself. This is a really great resource. You'll learn a ton about canonical URLs. So, let's talk about how we actually do it. Now, again, there's a lot of different plugins you can use that make this process a little bit easier. I'm going to show you the way I've been doing it with Google Experiments. So, the first thing you need to do is make sure that you have Google Analytics installed in WordPress. I use Monster Insights for this. It's just super easy. Then, we're going to go ahead and we're going to jump into our Google Analytics. We'll have everything set up. On the left-hand side of Google Analytics, there is behavior. So, we want to click on behavior, and then we're going to go to experiments. It's going to bring up a page that looks a lot like this. Click on experiment. We're going to leave it at web experiments. We can click on create experiment here. Now, to backtrack a little bit here, there are actually a lot of themes. I think it's not a lot of themes. We've got Divi, there's Thrive. There's a bunch of themes that actually have this stuff built into them. So, it makes it a lot easier on the theme side. So, if you're serious about doing testing, I'd look into the themes that you're choosing, but you can do this with anything. There's also plugins. So, we'll hit create the experiment. We'll have a list here of all of the experiments that we've done. We're going to click on stuff as well as the experiments that we're creating. This section here, we're just going to fill out all the different pieces. So, we're going to name the experiment. Now, for those of you that have played around with Google Analytics, you're familiar with the objectives and metrics and stuff. Basically, you can, in Google Analytics, you can set your conversions. So, any conversions that you set in Google Analytics drop down or set a selector metric. Otherwise, you can go ahead and create a new objective. Percentage of traffic to experiment. This is where we can decide if we just want to do a small sample of our traffic or if we just want to test with everybody. I like this one because I like getting notifications when things are happening that are cool. It's just basically going to send you a message ending your email, letting you know that you've had changes for this. Okay, next we're going to hit the advanced options. This is going to allow us to distribute traffic evenly if we want to. We can set a minimum time to experiment and run. This is definitely something I love to be able to set that time so that if I forget about it, it will automatically shut off for me. Then a confidence threshold. Basically, we can give it a call off point where if it's hit 30%, it wins. We're talking about conversions, right? We're testing our conversion. If the new page or the new copy or whatever we're testing, our test subject or variable, if it is 30% more, if it's winning 30% more than the other page, it will let you know. You can get very in depth with this or you can be very simple with it. It's kind of fun. It allows you to choose multiple objectives. So out there I have pages. Okay. So the next step, this is where you show the, you set in the URLs that you're going to be testing. So we have our constant up on the top and then our first variant. You can add multiple variants if you want so you can test multiple things. I prefer to stay with just one variant. It makes the data a lot easier to read. Okay. This part can be somewhat tricky but there's plugins that help you with this as well. So we're going to go ahead and click on manually insert the code and then it brings us to this information here. Okay. So we want to copy this code and there's a couple different ways we can do it. We can either put it in the header of the theme and to your point, a little bit more technical and there are plugins that can help you do it but if you are technical and want to give it a try, you're going to wrap that content, excuse me, that code with this little bit of PHP and then you're going to replace your page ID with the page ID of your constant. For those of you that want to use a plugin to do it, this is a phenomenal plugin to do it. It makes it super easy and it was written by a few of our local devs here. So does this plugin take you through the steps so you're not doing it at Google and I know that you're doing it on the... So no, this plugin, this one here is just connecting that code. So this code right here, you're just basically copying this and then if you use this plugin rather than having to insert code in the header there's a place where you just toss it in there and it makes it a lot easier. Does the plugin also uninstall it later on? Uninstall, take out the... No, you need to do it. Thank you, good question. So it puts it in for you but can you tell it to take it out or do you have to go back in and try and create that? So it's just like any other plugin is going to show up on the left-hand side of your dashboard click on it and it'll give a little window to input the code. Put it down with the test and just wipe the code. Oh, from that spot, from the plugin. It said it's Iblum that could experiment. Does it just end on its own? Like the code will still be there but it's not actually... It won't run. The code will still be there but it won't run. Okay, you've run your test. So I have a lot more in my mind that I was going to talk about and apparently I sped through it. Can we get a copy of yours? Yeah, absolutely. I'll put them on...