Parallel Design Comparison Part III

This is the third of a three post article on a parallel design comparison. The first and second part of this article can be found here: Parallel Design Comparison, and Parallel Design Comparison Part II.

So here we have three sites, all three are about credit cards, all three are trying to drive referral clicks, but only one is really getting the job done. Looking at the comments from the previous posts, we have one vote for the first site, three for the second site (the second one was my first impression), and another vote for the third site. The second site wins?

A simple breakdown of the sites are as follows:

• http://www.nowcreditcards.co.uk/ (Link was removed, site appears to be down for good) – Content and ads below
• Credit Cards Comparison – Ads on home page, and content on other pages
• Compare Credit Cards – Content with banner ad on right

What Site Does Best?

The site performing the best is http://www.nowcreditcards.co.uk/. Why? Well apparently in this case, content is truly king. The site drives the best search engine traffic. The search engine traffic could also be influenced because of it’s double menu, making the site very keyword rich. I wouldn’t suggest having a double menu like this for usability reasons, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting the sites performance at the moment. Visitors are finding the site, and they are clicking on the referral links.

The second site, Credit Cards Comparison is ranking well for it’s main keyword, but it’s not making the conversion. This is due to the fact that though visitors are finding the site using secondary keywords, they are not landing on the home page, and not making the conversion. They are simply landing on the content pages, and then taking off. The only conversions the site is getting is when a visitor lands on the home page for the main keyword, and this is unfortunate because those visitors convert more often than the first site.

The third site, Compare Credit Cards, is way behind. Search engine traffic has not developed, and the referral links are simply not visible enough. I hate to say this, but they need more ads if they want to make this site work.

So What’s the Lesson

The lesson comes from seeing the parts that fail, and being able to compare.

• The first site failure – Not converting well because ads are hidden
• The second site failure – Visitors are landing on the wrong page
• The third site failure – Not showing enough ads, and not driving keyword traffic

What should the owner do? Here is the beauty of parallel design. If he had only designed one site there is no way of knowing what is failing, and what is doing well. All the owner could do is try to make the one site better one step at a time, and hope it works. Comparisons take a long time that way. Because he has three sites doing the same thing though, he knows what could use improvement, and what is doing well. In this case content is clearly important, add placement should be highly visible, and ads should found on every page.

He doesn’t have to make all of the changes at once either. Why mess with the best site? He could work with the second site, adding the ads to all of the pages, similar to the first site, and this time he could put them all on top. Then he would have two similar sites, #1 and #2, with only one real difference, ad location. Yet another opportunity to see what does better with parallel design. Do you see that advantage of parallel design?