Conversion Chicken

A Lot of people have been asking me “Why would I use the Conversion Chicken when Google website optimizer is free and appears to do the same thing?”.

We’ll heres the lowdown: Google Website Optimizer is COSTING you a LOT more money than you think!

Don’t believe me? I’ll let the numbers tell you the story.

Lets say you’ve just launched a new product: a $27 Ebook. To test its conversion rate you want to send a flood of traffic to it immediately, lets say 1000 visitors a day for a week (7 days).

For the sake of simplicity I’ll say you’re only testing on variable: the headline (although I do realize both testers can test multiple variables at once, this is just so we can see how the maths works), and you decide to test 4 different headlines.

Headline A Converts at 3%
Headline B Converts at 1%
Headline C Converts at 0.5%
Headline D Converts at 0.5%

Now on the first day both split testers have no data, so they show each headline to the same amount of visitors, which would be 250 (1000 / 4).

Thus you make the following amounts in sales:

Headline A = 3% * 250 = 7.5 * $27 = $202.50
Headline B = 1% * 250 = 2.5 * $27 = $67.50
Headline C = 0.5% * 250 = 1.25 * $27 = $33.75
Headline D = 0.5% * 250 = 1.25 * $27 = $33.75

Total = $337.50

Now what the Conversion Chicken and Google Website Optimizer do differently at this point, is the Conversion Chicken automatically adjusts your sales page to show the better performing tests more often, so Headline A would show 3 x as much as headline B and 6 x as much as headlines C and D (as it converts that much better). While Google will still show all of them evenly. Lets see how this stacks up in day 2’s stats.

The Conversion Chicken will show each headline this amount of times (based on it’s conversion rate):

Headline A = 60%
Headline B = 20%
Headline C = 10%
Headline D = 10%

Google Website Optimizer:

Headline A = 3% * 250 = 7.5 * $27 = $202.50
Headline B = 1% * 250 = 2.5 * $27 = $67.50
Headline C = 0.5% * 250 = 1.25 * $27 = $33.75
Headline D = 0.5% * 250 = 1.25 * $27 = $33.75

Total = $337.50

Conversion Chicken:

Headline A = 3% * 600 = 18 * $27 = $486
Headline B = 1% * 200 = 2 * $27 = $54
Headline C = 0.5% * 100 = 0.5 * $27 = $13.50
Headline D = 0.5% * 100 = 0.5 * $27 = $13.50

Total = $567

In Just 1 Day Google has LOST you $229.50! Thats more than 4 times the cost of the Conversion Chicken.

Over the course of the week if you just keep them both running You will make:

Google = $337.50 * 7 = $2,362.50

Conversion Chicken = $337.50 + $567 * 6 = $337.50 + $3402 = $3739.50

Difference = $1377

By Using Google for that week you’ve lost over $1377 in sales!

Of course after this point most people will go into their stats, realize one headline is vastly outperforming the others and delete the under performing ones.

However in just 1 week (most people I know won’t touch their sales page for a week to give it time to fully test itself out) you’ve already lost over $1,300 in sales, over 10 x as much as the Conversion Chicken costs!

In case you’re wondering: yes the Conversion Chicken does adjust all its results in real time, not at the end of the day, thus even on the first day it would be outperforming google in sales.

So I Ask you, can you afford to be throwing thousands of dollars down the drain? Do You really want to make money with your product?

- Tim