Website Optimization

“APS made improvements to our online Pledge system that have resulted in a tipping point where more than half of all member donations now come through our web portal driving the down the cost of our on-air campaigns. APS also worked diligently on search engine optimization that have improved the visibility of Chicago Public Radio on the web resulting in a significant increase in daily web traffic.”
~ Dmitry Shub – IT Manager of WBEZ

We increased user time on site for Chicago Public Radio from 2 minutes to over 20 in just 6 months.  Their homepage traffic went up 450% in the same time period.  One of our recent clients was spending over 20 thousand dollars a month in Ad Words, and we increased their ROI over 40% in just 2 months – and it’s still improving (we also decreased total Pay Per Click advertising in this same time period).  Other optimization services can charge thousands of dollars a month with long term commitments and no guaranteed results!  APS offers short term, flexible contracts that are performance based.

Website optimization is simply the practice of performing iterative testing on your site to determine incremental improvements and apply them.  Techniques include standard A/B testing (2 versions of a page tested to see which performs better) and multivariate testing (basically multiple A/B tests performed at the same time).  We like to think of website optimization as where the scientific method meets website development.  Not everything needs to be an experiment though as it’s helpful to know before hand a lot of the concepts that lead to a better performing web site.

• Don’t redesign your website without justification.
• Start simply and create tests you can learn from.
• Be involved in the process, don’t just outsource it.
• Study.  Test.  Learn.  Optimize.  Repeat.