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Until now it’s not been possible to measure the impact of SEO and CRO at the same time. Today we’re proud to announce a new feature of Distilled’s Optimisation Delivery Network that we’re calling full funnel testing.

Our ODN platform launched with a focus on SEO testing. You have probably thought about this by comparing it to tools like Optimizely that allow you to do CRO testing. If you want to know more about how SEO testing works and how it’s different to CRO, you can read more in this post on what is SEO testing.

The trouble with just using one or the other is you don’t have any insight into how they impact each other.

That’s a big problem because we know from our testing that a lot of SEO changes impact conversion rate and a lot of CRO changes (even when they increase conversion rate) can negatively impact organic traffic. If you haven’t read it already, you should check out Will’s blog post on the impact of rolling out negative SEO changes but here’s an example of when it goes wrong. This chart shows the search impact of a suggested CRO change on SEO. It decreased organic traffic by 25%.

For that reason, we see the relationship between SEO and CRO like this:

We saw a need to be able to measure SEO and CRO at the same time. For the last few months, we’ve been running a beta version for some of our clients of what we are calling “full-funnel testing”. Today we’re opening that feature up to everyone and we’d like to show you how it works.

How does it work?

Let’s look at CRO first. To run a CRO experiment, we cookie users based on the landing page design that they arrive on, they’ll then always see that version when they move between pages.

The result is we know the impact on conversion rate, but we don’t know the impact on SEO.

When we do pure SEO testing, we split pages, not users and look at the different impacts on search traffic to the control and variant pages:

The result of this framework is that we know the impact on SEO but we don’t know the impact on conversion rate:

A new framework – Full-funnel testing

With full funnel testing, the site is set up initially in the same way as in the pure SEO testing scenario – and then when someone arrives on a landing page, the SEO testing part of the experiment is complete:

We can then pivot into a CRO experiment by dropping a cookie for that user to make sure they see the same template that they first landed on when moving between pages:

Note that, having landed on the Unicorns page initially, they now see the “A” template version on all subsequent pageviews even on pages like Cats and Badgers that would be set up with the “B” template for anyone landing directly on them as a new visitor:

The result is that we are able to measure the impact of changes on SEO and CRO at the same time.

Thanks for making it this far, you can expect to hear more about this as we get more examples of full-funnel tests and start to share what we learn. If you’d like to know more or see a demo, reach out to us here.

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