The antiques market generally isn't considered at the forefront of technological innovation. But Skinner Auctions, an auctioneer and appraiser of antiques and fine art, recognize the potential benefits of rejuvenating its online bidding process after clientele started to embrace its new Web auction format.

Despite overall website visitor growth, bidding conversion rates were actually declining in recent years. To improve those rates, Skinner's marketing team decided to elevate the Web channel as its primary sales channel.

This involved testing and experimenting with the site's content to determine which changes would positively influence conversion rates. Part of the challenge, explains Kerry Shrives, vice president at Skinner, was that the team didn't collect much data about customer behavior on the site and, as a result, had no understanding of how customers moved through it, or of what worked and didn't work for visitors. "When you're close to your own product, it's hard to get a handle on how customers actually interact with it," Shrives says. "We'd deploy things and think, 'This seems to make sense.'

Skinner brought in SiteSpect, a multivariate and A/B testing solutions provider, to help identify potential website adjustments. Skinner's Web marketing team tested such elements as catalog page layout, messaging, landing pages, and calls to action. "What testing gives you is the ability to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks," says SiteSpect president Eric J. Hansen.

A unique aspect of the SiteSpect process is the ability to test without disrupting workflow. Skinner manipulates the site content as it's streamed over the Internet to a person's browser. The website continues to serve the homepage and the traffic is routed through the SiteSpect site, which tests content on the fly.

One of the elements Shrives says the company tested was the email registration box. "We have a fairly lean design…we found that when we tweaked the placement, everything we chose worked out perfectly," he says.

For the registration box, it was a matter of setting a number of different samples to run against each other—each with different colors and a variety of text—and then comparing them against a control group and moving the location around the site.

The optimized changes to the sign-up links and copy have enabled Skinner to increase the number of people who receive email marketing—about 100 people per week. In addition, the time visitors spend on the site increased after the initial changes; 40 percent for the number of items viewed and 22 percent for catalog downloads.

Shrives says Skinner is about to embark on a website redesign, so the team will be testing format and content. He also says that the company is looking for ways to encourage bidding. "It's been evolving, but it's a slow and gradual process."