When we first began offering Ezoic as a service to website owners, we had full control over the experiments. When a site signed up, we would automatically build 100+ different layouts and test them all. I’ll admit, some were prettier than others 🙂
Here at Ezoic, we live, eat and breathe data. If a certain layout is earning more money than the original site, and is also seeing improvements in user experience metrics (time on site, pageviews per visit, bounce rate), then that’s a winner in our book – we rarely make an opinion about the ‘look’ of the site.
However, we are all entitled to our own opinions, especially our customers. Just be careful because sometimes personal opinions can hinder results.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a screenshot of a certain layout from a publisher who thought that the layout was ugly and was hurting UX. Back then, everything was done as a blind test, so the publisher had no idea what the stats for that particular layout were. I decided to do some research. Digging in a bit, I found out that that particular layout had the best user experience metrics of any layout, including the original site.
This doesn’t mean that personal opinion doesn’t matter – it does. Especially when you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into building your site. Which is why weave switched things up a bit. You now have the ability to choose the layouts you want to test and if there are ones you don’t like, feel free to remove them. However, as the example proves, sometimes the data will surprise you.
Happy testing!