She had this to say:
"We had worked hard to create a very attractive and informative site. Traffic did significantly increase but we were frustrated by the total lack of increased bookings, sales were flat.""If more people were viewing the site and everyone liked it why wasn’t that translating into more conversions? We were stumped." The web site enabled bookings to be made online for hotel accommodation and acted as a marketing platform for weddings and conferences for which reservations were taken offline. Although traffic to the website had gone up by almost 97% in the past year, revenue had not increased by the same amount, PPC was not profitable and the conversion of site visitors to hotel guests had stalled at around 0.11%. And if you can’t get enough free organic search engine traffic, paying for visitors by using pay per click is not necessarily cost-effective, even during a test, as this study shows.
SITE EVALUATION
The majority of traffic entered the site through the homepage and although this page was visually appealing it suffered from poorly focused content with unclear navigation and too many links that were a distraction for visitors. Before making any modifications 35 web pages on the site were chosen for a traffic survey to determine visitor behaviour. The survey confirmed concerns about the unfocused site navigation and identified four other key website pages apart from the homepage.
TEST FACTORS
Elements on the homepage selected for testing were: Page Layout
The original page comprised a large header graphic and a single center panel. This was modified for the test pages to include a smaller header graphic with left and right side panels and the center panel color was lightened to make text easier to read. Header Graphic
The header graphic consisted of a very large 650 x 405 pixel image of the hotel which was to be replaced in the test pages by two different versions 775 x 140 pixels. Page Headline
Two new headlines were created for the test pages. One short headline with a sub-headline and the second a longer main headline with no sub-headline. Main Body Content
Completely new content was written for the test pages more focused and sectionalized for the different interests of each target group of visitors. A single version of this content was applied to all the new test pages. Navigation
The original page navigation was a mixture of text links and graphic images, many of which were not clear to the visitor as even being navigation links. The text links were not the conventionally accepted blue underlined but instead used the same color as text on the page and were also not underlined. Two text links were even located between the headline and sub-headline. The image links were also unclear and obscured in the header graphic and a large distracting sitemap with too many unnecessary links was located at the foot of the page. This was all replaced in the test pages by a 6 image buttons in the left-hand panel for visitor navigation and text links at the foot of the page for search engine navigation. Additional Images
To some of the test pages were added a number of 200 x 160 pixel images that related to the text content alongside and designed to show features of the hotel. Testimonials
To some of the test pages, testimonials were added to the left and right panels, running the full length of the page. A simple test was designed in which 5 different versions of the homepage were tested against the original unmodified homepage in a 6 way A/B/C/D/E/F split test. Equal amounts of traffic were then sent to each page in such a way that only page impressions for unique visitors were counted and returning visitors were presented with the same page they first viewed. The test pages can be seen in the full  PDF report (1.2MB)
ADDITIONAL KEY SITE PAGES
The traffic survey had revealed four other key site pages in terms of visitor viewing behaviour. These four key pages each contained information regarding the hotel, including room types, wedding services and a media tour of the hotel. These web pages were redesigned to have freshly written content, modified page layouts, new graphics & photos, and for one page, a video was recreated to make it more viewable by visitors.
TEST SCENARIO
Visitors to the site when presented with test page version A (1) would see the original home page and the four original key pages if they used the navigation. Visitors presented with test page versions B(2) to F(6) would see a new homepage variant and new modified key pages if they clicked the on-page navigation. The 6 way A/B/C/D/E/F split test lasted for 59 days during which time each page was viewed by an average of 1,258 unique visitors and no other modifications were made to the web site.
TEST RESULTS
The results showed that page version 2(B) produced a conversion rate of 0.64% compared to the original homepage version 1(A) with a conversion rate of 0.08%. Using the exact conversion rate figures for version 2 of 8/1258 and version 1 as 1/1255 gave an increased conversion rate for the homepage of ( 0.63593 – 0.07968 ) / 0.07968 = 698% The homepage conversion rate improvement was therefore 698% All new homepage versions produced a better conversion rate than the original homepage. Even the worst performing new homepage had a conversion rate just under 0.4% compared to 0.08% for the original page. However, statistically there was not a significant enough difference between the new versions to determine an outright winner. The test would need to be run for longer. The best performing new homepage was 8 times better than the
old page and even the worst performing page was 5 times better The average number of online lodging bookings per day taken by the hotels reservation system during the 6 months prior to the conversion improvement work was compared to the average online bookings and value per day taken during the test period. The results showed the site sales revenue was improved by 181% Before the split-test was run it was expected that either test page versions 5 or 6 that included on-page photos and testimonials to the left and right side of the page would be one of the best converting pages. In fact whilst the results showed that both of them performed equally well, neither performed as well as version 2 which had no on-page photos or testimonials. This was contrary to what was expected.
CONCLUSIONS
The study showed that the conversion rate of a homepage with a low traffic volume of less than 4,000 unique visitors per month could be improved by 698% coupled with an almost tripling of sales revenue. This demonstrated that web sites with low volumes of traffic are just as capable of achieving high conversion rate improvements through testing as web sites with medium to high volumes of traffic – 100,000+ unique visitors per month. Download the  FREE trial test report (PDF, 1.2MB):
Simple Split Test Increases Web Page Conversion by 698%
Website Sales Revenue by 181%
For increasing online sales click here to discover more Note 1.
A typical study on a high traffic site was published by Marketing Sherpa – case #CS761 - May 24, 2007 "Multivariate Test Lifts Subscription Site’s Revenue 697%." 
In this test pages were required to be served to 110,000 unique visitors over a few weeks.
Note 2.
A further two high traffic studies were published by Marketing Experiments on July 16, 2007 entitled "Landing Page Optimization Tested - Creating Effective Incentives." One study involved a large subscription-based site and another the world’s largest online news service.
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