Experiments I’ve Run With Comparison Tables On My Niche Sites

As well as growing Humanproofdesigns and constantly trying to deliver better service to you guys, I'm also constantly working on my own niche sites to try to improve conversions, boost traffic, and to generally see what does and doesn't work.

The amount of time I can dedicate to these sites doesn't really allow much room for increasing traffic, but when it comes to improving conversions, there are loads of different things to be tried.

In this post, I'll talk one of the latest things that I've tried across a number of sites, and discuss how the results went. This should give you some great ideas for things to test on your own sites.

WordPress Comparison Tables

There are two sites I own that have a decent amount of traffic to one or two “buying” pages. The sort of pages like “Best XYZ”. After studying a few other sites, I decided to implement a comparison table and see if I could boost conversions.

I had mixed results, but mostly conversions at Amazon have increased massively. It's always hard to tell if this is because of something you did or because of the summer and the economy getting better, so people tend to be spending more money across the board. When your conversions increase by that amount though, it's fair to assume you did something right.

Why mixed results?

With my Kettlebell site, I wanted to boost my Amazon conversions while maintaining my Dragondoor conversions, as they offer a higher payout.

I DID increase the Amazon conversions, from about 20 sales a month to about 40-50 (80 last month), but Dragondoor has been mixed. Last month I still got around $100 in sales at Dragondoor, but the month before I got almost nothing. This month I've made about 2 sales, so the verdict is still out.

Overall

The actual income is about the same now. However I view increased Amazon conversions as much more beneficial as there is the potential of a huge payday should one of those conversions do a large amount of shopping, or if somebody buys a high ticket items. I'm guaranteed a 6.5% commission and enjoy around 15% conversion rate at Amazon which is huge.

Since I am planning to start a few “high ticket” Amazon sites throughout the rest of the year, having lots of smaller sales bumping my commission up to 6.5 or even 7% is worth a lot more.

Implementation

If you fancy setting up your own comparison charts, there are a couple of simple ways of doing it. The first is to use TablePress, a free plugin that let's you set up tables how you like, and the second is the manual way that I did it, using this website and its template.

It's a bit tricky for beginners to use, but once you've got your head around where to stick the CSS and HTML coding, it's actually quite straightforward.

If you have no idea about CSS or HTML, use the TablePress plugin.

Here's how I set up my charts.

kb-chart

I made the title and the image a link, so that people would click to find out the price, and hence get my Amazon cookie in their browsers. I haven't yet tested conversions if I actually list the price, but it's something I will do at some point down the road. I imagine it will be lower though.

I did basically the same layout on my two largest posts on two sites, and both of them had an increase in conversions, although the Kettlebell one was a lot better. This is because it gets more traffic, the products cost less, and there are much more products to choose from.

I'll continue to use these product comparison charts in future as they are currently a very good way of getting passive conversions.

I'll keep running tests and experiments across my sites and reporting the findings here, so make sure you're subscribed to my latest posts.

Have You Had Any Experience With Tables?

What else do you recommend testing to boost conversions? Let me know in the comments below!

6 thoughts on “Experiments I’ve Run With Comparison Tables On My Niche Sites”

  1. Bryon,
    Good tips. Thanks. I followed another online guru who said the carousels helped increase conversion by a double digit %. I am really tired of these gurus. They sound so genuine beofre you get hooked after that they are cross selling each other to make a buck. I know we are here to make some money but you get the sense that they are trying to vacuum the big bucks out of you…
    I am retired and have zero income and i have joined training. They are not a total waste of time but you do learn something but not the critical thing on how to make money for sure. At the end of the day you have to deal with Google’s idiosyncrasies and also compete with the giants. It’s quite disheartening.. the online dream is just a mirage eventhough we try to do our best. I wish you aii the best and glad that you have traction. Time to roll up the sleeves and sweat for the money. Good luck.

    1. Maybe that particular guru was right, I’ve not used carousels, because I find tables like this do much better. Also text links work fine.

      One thing I’ve found is that each person/site/niche can have different results, so it’s just a case of testing them.

      Sorry you feel jaded, but I know your position. Feel free to get in touch if you want some help/advice/guidance/motivation 🙂 http://www.humanproofdesigns.com/contact/

  2. Bryon,
    Like your straightforwardness. I have started and worked on an affiliate site with zero conversions (first month). http://www.sunshinecheer.com. I went into the first free month with WA and the whole experience was too overwhelming. Anyway, good luck on your journey. Like your site.

    1. Hey there,

      Your site is so new, it probably isn’t getting enough traffic yet to get conversions. I wouldn’t worry about that yet.

      What kind of traffic numbers are you getting?

      You could definitely benefit from sticking some tables in though, as your content is currently quite text heavy. By the way, I’m not sure if the Amazon carousels work properly on mobile or iPads etc, so that might be another cause of low conversions.

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