Welcome readers! This is a long-ish post with lots of images, so it might take a minute to load.
One thing that we hear all the time about selling products online is the importance of great product photos. However, it’s not enough just to take good photos – as online sellers we have to pick the images that will catch the eye of buyers. Picking the image that shows off your product best is a tricky business – take a look at all these requests in the Etsy forums! Trouble is, simply asking people what photo they like best is a very unscientific way to go about it – we will usually only get a small number of responses, and people may like or dislike an image for reasons that have nothing to do with how well it sells your product.
Fortunately, there’s a technique that we can use to pick between two photos by actually measuring which one people like best. The technique is called “split testing” or “A/B testing” and how it works is very simple. Imagine you have a blog post which contains a picture of your latest product which your visitors can click on to buy it, and you have two good photos, A and B. Every time a visitor views the post, you pick A or B at random and show them that photo. Then you measure the number of people that click on each photo (we call this the “conversion rate”). The photo that gets more people to click on it is the winner!
Even though it’s very simple, this technique is very powerful, because it actually measures the difference in performance between the two photos. Big online sellers use this approach all the time. Have you ever looked at a product page on Amazon.com, for instance, and noticed that it displays a different picture from one day to the next? That’s because they are A/B testing different images to see which one sells more.
Now unfortunately we can’t use A/B testing on our Etsy shops, because we can’t directly change the code of the Etsy web pages. However, if you have a blog or website of your own (for example, a WordPress or Blogger blog), you can use A/B testing, even if you send your visitors to Etsy to actually buy your product. I’ve made a new tool that makes A/B testing your images easy, and in the rest of this post I’ll show you how to use it by setting up a test, using an example product from Max and Molly Designs. The new tool is hosted at lazzia.com; you don’t need to create an account, and you can run 3 image tests for free (and pay only $1 per test after that).
The example I’m going to use is this screen-printed T-shirt. You can see that there are two main photos – one of the T-shirt being worn by a model, and one of it hanging up:
Let’s say we want to make a blog post featuring this item, with a nice big picture of the product, but we don’t know in advance which photo will generate the most interest. We’ll use my new tool, to set up an image test using these two photos. Once we’ve found the best image, we can not only use it on a blog, but also make it the first image in the Etsy listing, include it in email newsletters, etc.
First, we’ll go to lazzia.com and log on.
Lazzia.com allows you to log in using your existing account from Google, Yahoo, WordPress, or Blogger, so you don’t need to create a new account. I use Gmail, so I’m going to log in with my Google account.
Once I’ve logged in, I click “Start a test”
Now to fill in the form. There are only three bits of information I need – the addresses of the two images, and the address that I want the user to go to when they click the photo. To find out the addresses of the two images, I’ll browse to the Etsy listing page. The best way to get the location of an image is different depending on which web browser you are using, so take a look at this page for instructions for your browser. In this case, the two image addresses are
http://ny-image1.etsy.com/il_570xN.167632981.jpg
and
http://ny-image2.etsy.com/il_570xN.167632982.jpg
The destination address is also easy to find; I can just copy it from the address bar of my browser:
It is
http://www.etsy.com/listing/54281811/greyhound-adoption-screenprinted-cotton
Armed with this information, I can pick a name for the test and fill in the form:
When I click the “Start the test!” button, I’m taken to a new page that gives me the code to put in my blog post where I want the image to appear.
I can now go to my blog, create a new post, and copy and paste the code where I want the image. Be sure to use HTML mode when you do this step. Here’s what it looks like when I create the post on a test WordPress blog:
Now when my visitors view the post, half of them will see this:
And half of them will see this:
Try it for yourself – here is a link to the test blog post. Over the next few days, lazzia.com will count how many people view each picture, and how many click on it to go to the shop. When I log on to lazzia.com again after a few days, I can click on “Results” to see how many views and clicks the two photos have got between them:
And then I can click on the name of the test to see the information I am really interested in – which photo got the highest percentage of clicks?
The result tells me that the photo of the model wearing the T-shirt got a higher click-through rate than the one of it hanging up, so I know that I should use that photo to promote the item.
Once the test has finished, lazzia.com will stop showing the photos randomly and instead will show the winning photo (the one with the highest click-through rate) to all visitors, so you can safely leave the code in place. Don’t forget to set the wining photo as the first one on your Etsy listing though!
If you’d like to give A/B testing a try, head over to lazzia.com and get started. If you’d like to know more, check out the frequently asked questions or read about how it works. If you need help, or if I’ve failed to explain anything clearly, drop me an email – martin@whalesharkwebsites.com. And if any Etsy sellers would like to experiment with using lazzia.com on a larger scale, let me know and I can add some free credits to your account.
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