Recently, I redesigned my photography community website, The Lens Flare, and everything has been positive so far except for one thing. The pages viewed per visit has dropped in half.

I suspected that the problem had to do with the navigation. I wanted to test a few things out to see which one would be the best to drive up the pages viewed per visit stat, in other words, which combination or recipe would entice somebody to click a link and visit an additional page on the site. My site is split up into several virtual directories such as artwork, artists, reviews, etc. Using Google Analytics, I took a look at the Top Content report and did a search for any pages inside the virtual folders by putting the folder name in the “find url” box. For example, I searched for “/gallery/”. There were 3 numbers that I was specifically analyzing: pageviews, bounce rate, and exit percentage.

This was so that I could focus on an area of the site that would give me the most bang for my buck, so to speak. I settled on the gallery pages because their bounce rate and exit % was higher than other pages, and their overall page views are a large percentage of the overall site.

This was my first attempt with Google Optimizer, so I didn’t want to try anything too hard at first. I settled on testing the font styles of the navigational links. I tested a normal font, a bold font, a different color font of the anchor tags, as well as a different background color for the navigational headings.

I set up my test as any gallery page (page with a large photograph) and my goal page as any link that could be accessed from the gallery pages. Optimizer won’t count a goal unless a person has visited the test page first, but even still, there was a margin of error built into this test because a person could visit a gallery page and then navigate all over the site, and end up at say the artist pages, which was set as a goal.

A second margin of error is the number of total views per recipe or combination of changes, which in my case was “bold + different color”, “bold + different background”, “all 3″, etc. The more people that receive a recipe, the lower your margin of error drops. This particular margin is calculated by Google and is represented as a +/- %.

With this in mind, I ran the test for 2 days and found that the bold links seemed to be the best (about a 60% increase in conversions). The margin of error that Google calculates was still high enough that the results were non-conclusive. I didn’t wait long enough because I wanted to revamp all the nav, with different links, and knew that if I did that, it would completely mess up the test.

In a few days, when the dust settles down after all the regular users have got over the shock of different navigation, I’m going to rerun the test. This time; however, I’m going to set it up differently. Optimizer allows you to set an event on the page as a goal. Therefore, I’m going to set an onclick event on each of the page’s links to register the goal. This way, a person can’t just stumble on one of the goal pages and have it counted as a conversion. They have to actually click a link on the page, which will reduce the overall error margin.

There are two ways to set up your test. The first is a page element, and the second is a combination of a page element. I set everything up as a combination, so I manually set up “bold”, “bold & orange”, “orange”, “bold & blue background”, “bold, blue bg, & orange links”, etc. This was a mistake. Rather, I should have set up bold as a page element, orange as another element, and the different background as a third. It would have made it a lot simpler because I would have only had to set up 3 things instead of 8.

All in all, MVT or Multivariant Testing, is the way to go to increase your conversion rate for whatever your site goals are. There are many companies out there that offer this service, but most are really expensive as in thousands of dollars per month. Google’s Optimizer is free and is #2 on the list of MVT programs that I’ve used. The only better is SiteSpect, but they are over $1k/month for 1 domain and more like $5-6k a month if you want unlimited domains. Google’s Optimizer is free and is relatively easy to use as long as you know how your website is set up. I’ve used Vertster and Optimost and found that they were more difficult to set up and manage than Optimizer.