Rotating the Home Page

[tedster]

I am considering rotating two different home pages, in order to measure which one draws people into the site more effectively. The technique would be to run the first two versions for a while, then keep the best performing page, using it as the control or performance benchmark. At that point, I would design a new "alternate" page to try to beat the control values, and in this way, evolve more and more effective copy and layout from a marketing perspective.

Does anyone have experience doing something like this? All things considered, especially the search engines, what might be the simplest and/or the best ways to accomplish this purpose (the site will be hosted by a third party, not on the client's own server)?

I'd appreciate any comments that come to mind.

[Brett_Tabke]

I've done quite a bit of that tedster. I've tried rotating the pages on a weekly basis for 4 weeks. Sometimes I even tried rotating them hourly (swapping hours from week to week). I think the whole point would be to messure the click through rate or conversion rate.

The biggest test I did was swapping clients colors. They were green and yellow. One day we went with yellow and green and the next the opposite. Exact same graphics, just color changes. To my amazement, the bright yellow had a better click through rate down into content, but we had more one-hit-wonders. It finally dawned on us that people were just getting away from the yellow as fast as they could by any means available (either the back button or down into the site).

Thus, even after the test is done, it will take some finesse to interp the data.