Blog vs. News/Editorial Layout?

[seointern]

We're in the coupon blogging space & saw that one of the larger coupon sites move away from the more traditional blog layout: http://thekrazycouponlady.com they now have more of an editorial type layout. Here is another site which is more similar to our layout: http://hip2save.com.

So here are my questions:

• Which layout type do you feel better serves their visitors & why?

• How does the affect the SEO of the site?

• How does it affect the advertising revenues?

• Which layout do you prefer?

Is there strategy in this move for the coupon blog, or is this just a preference on how they now display their content?

We're making some updates to our design soon & I wanted to get some feedback on the overall direction we take.

[EGOL]

Don't ask us and don't guess yourself.

Instead, toss up a version and test it on your visitors.... then try something different...

The response of your visitors is the only response that matters.

If you have a content management system it isn't a whole lot of work to try something different.

Some of the page formats on my site have been through 15 different versions and the income / engagement differences between them have been enormous.

About the SEO.... if you don't change the title, navigation links and other on-page elements of the design there should be little impact on the SEO.

[seointern]

I'm always afraid of drastic tests, how would you do that on a large scale? With the 15 different versions you tested on your pages, what were the key items you were measuring?

Any chance you can share more info on the enormous differences in your changes & how measured this? Ultimately this is what I'm looking to do. I just want to make a calculated decision before jumping into it.

That's good to know about the SEO...thanks!

[EGOL]

We put up version A and get data on a large number of visitors.

Then  we make a logical change to the position of the elements to produce version B and run that to get data on a large number of visitors.

These changes are not yet tweaking colors or fonts.  They are testing ad positions or navigation formats.

We watch the data for changes in things like ad yields, number of pageviews, time on site, number of sales - whatever metrics are important to you.

If you have a lot of traffic you can determine if a design is tanking in a short amount of time but if you have small amounts of traffic you might need to run split tests or separate tests for days, weeks or months.

After we have tested a few very different designs we then start tweaking ad colors.  This is done by creating a program to change ad colors hourly with a separate channel for each hour.  On one of my sites my first choice of ad background color was ffffee... then after testing many different colors I learned that ffffee had the lowest yield.

We found up to 10x differences in revenue from different formats and up to 2x differences in revenue from different ad colors.

It is much easier to double your income from your current traffic than it is to double your traffic.

[seointern]

What analytic tools do you use? We currently have Google Analytics, but I'm familiar with KissMetrics & Crazyegg, do either of those make this process easier to measure?