Countdown TImer

Hi glorbus,

Never assume that updating the design of your website will improve sales performance. It is often the case that a fresh new design lowers conversion rates. Contrary to what most graphic designers will pitch, aesthetics of your website design may have little positive effect on conversions. It is the marketing message, and how it is delivered through your design that does 90%, or more, of the selling on your website.

It is only when the design gets in the way of delivering the message, in the proper sequence, that your design will have much impact on conversion rates. Many top converting pages are plain vanilla designs.

I often see people make design choice strictly for improving aesthetics, not realizing that those design changes are creating usability issues that are harming conversion rates.

I suggest that you restore a backup of your previous design, if you have it. Then try making only 1 or 2 small changes at a time, measure the impact before making those changes permanent. An even better idea is to setup an A/B split test to thoroughly test all changes to your website before making any of them permanent.

With Google Optimize be freely available to all webmaster you no longer have an excuse to not test website changes each and every time you make them.

HTH,

Don Burk

Even though they seem to work for some people, I personally get turned off when the countdown timer is proven to be fake.

If someone will lie to me with something like "only 30 minutes left for your 25% discount", I figure they will lie about most everything else too.

Of course, they aren't lying if the 25% discount really and truly ends in 30 minutes.

Mark

the thing is even if you are telling the truth and it ended in 20 minutes what do you get out of that when they find out you told the truth but they wont get it anyway since it costs twice as much now?

I dont know what kind of traffic but my traffic comes in cold from emails. and from what I can tell, 80-90% buy within an hour of clicking.

Are you coming from a cold email generated perspective here or a more organic traffic perspective?

you mention your sales dropped off after new design ! why the change ? because if you were making sales before the change WHY!!

Jason

Because i need to make more sales than I was making before to meet affiliate standards.

If you change more than a single element on your site
and your results change....

How do you know what caused the change? You don't!

Go back to your original design with a timer to test the result.

Then revert to your new design without a timer and test the result

Then use you new design with the timer and test the result.

Wait until you've had at least 500 visits and finish with whichever variant wins.

Google make it easy to do this using variants.

NEVER EVER EVER...change more than a single element....I learned from experience.

.

I'm in agreement with you that the short timer may be turning off visitors because it can be annoying to someone that wants more time to make a decision. But, you need a larger number of tests to decide if it's helping your conversions or not.

It comes down to credibility. If you have a limited number of physical products available, using a countdown timer could be a logical tactic. Similarly, if you intend to raise the price of your product on a particular date, putting a reminder in front of your visitors can nudge them into action.

But simply sticking some generic timer on a sales page for a digital product which everyone knows is theoretically unlimited, is just crass, and usually smacks of desperation.

And the term evergreen timer is an oxymoron, if ever I've heard one.

. . . and then there are the "fake" timers, you know, the ones that roll to nearly zero then automatically reset so they never reach "timed out." And I've seen some that simply reset every time the page is refreshed or every time you come back to the sales page.

Timers are so common these days, IMO they are often discounted or ignored completely (whether or not there is actually a cut off time).

Steve

To be brutally honest, it's almost impossible to tell without split testing your offer.

How do scientists make breakthrough discoveries? By conducting scientific experimentation.



In our world, as marketers, split testing, and measuring the results of these tests, is the best thing we have to determine what's working, and what isn't.

So, do evergreen countdown timers work? Should you have a countdown based upon reality instead? Or maybe there's a magic duration that works best for all situations?

I contend that the results would vary from marketplace to marketplace, from audience to audience, and the duration itself is a huge variable. The current knowledge of your target demographic is also a huge variable, and as you know it's something that constantly changes.

The only way to be sure, is to test these variables from within the boundaries of controlled experimentation.

I'd just like to say that the importance of using statistics in this business is immense. Proper use of them is key to running your IM business efficiently. And the statistics must be valid.

Fast adjust it to one day and see how the results will be

There's something about those fake timers that turns me off every time I see them.

And it's not that difficult to spot that they really are fake anyways.

The only time that I used a timer was when I was offering a bonus for an affiliate product that I was promoting to my traffic. I set the timer to 4 days and I actually manually removed the bonus page after 4 days. So it wasn't fake scarcity or anything like that.

I created a small 4 - day email promo where I was pushing the product and the bonuses while sharing value at the same time. It worked really well.

1 hour timer?

That is way, way too short for cold traffic. They don't know you yet and the timer just kills that relationship and trust even more. 1 hour? Seriously, even Jigsaw gives his victims more time to think ...

In my opinion, you should only use timers sparingly and for huge sales or discounts. You lose the value of timers when you use it very often and also the time is too short. Make the timer run for several days at least and only run them during certain seasons or days.

The purpose of timers is to create a psychological effect of urgency.