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“Prospective parents are accustomed to lots of tests: for the health of the baby, for its gender, and for the mother’s wellness. And so when BabyCenter.com, a content site aimed at parents-to-be, wanted to optimize to drive search traffic, it took a leaf from that baby book and did some testing of its own.

BabyCenter.com is one of the leading parenting sites on the Web; its combination of expert content, interactive tools, online community and e-commerce shopping attracts more than 4 million visitors a month according to comScore Media Metrix. Expectant parents can enter their due date and then sign up for e-mail newsletters.

There’s no co-registration for these newsletters; the site makes its revenue primarily through on-site ads, sale of content sponsorships and some selective lead generation using sweepstakes and special offers.

The site offers a number of useful tools, including an ovulation calculator and a pregnancy calendar, but one of its most heavily used is the Baby Name Finder: actually a suite of resources including lists of top 100 names, a search engine for finding names by origin or meaning, and a poll maker that lets parents test out possible names on their friends and family.

“Baby names are also an important part of our search marketing program,” says Heather Wajer, BabyCenter’s senior marketing manager. “Right now, 11 of our top 20 keywords are related to baby names.”

But until recently, visitors who clicked through those search ads didn’t arrive on a landing page relevant to baby names. As a result, BabyCenter was seeing a high bounce from that page.

“It was a very general landing page with creative that talked about our developmental content, our newsletters and our free print magazine,” Wajer says.

So BabyCenter needed a new landing page for its name tool. That meant testing different layouts and creative.

BabyCenter uploaded four new layout modules for the baby-name landing page and began measuring their performance, using the old landing page as a control. One of these choices simply offered the headline, “Looking for baby names?” and added “Find the perfect baby name and much more at BabyCenter.com.” It also offered a search box that defaulted to baby names and a BabyCenter sign-up box.

The other three test pages added more detail about the naming information users could find on the site. One gave greater detail about the ability to learn names’ meanings, find the hottest trends in baby names and poll friends and family; another provided that list but added more data about the other tools and services on the site. The last one actually teased the naming tool by listing the top five names for girls and boys in the previous year.

Wajer says BabyCenter was able to spot a winner within about eight days of initiating the test. Surprisingly, the simplest version produced the biggest lift in conversions (defined as users clicking through to the actual name-finder tool), with an increase of 67% over the old page. The pages that combining the baby-name headline with bullet-point details scored almost as well—around a 63% increase in conversions. Only the page with the list of top baby names failed to register any improvement over the former version.

“As marketers, we all think we know what’s going to improve conversions, but in reality consumers often behave differently than we expect,” Wajer says. “With testing, we can put those ideas to the test and settle those issues within a week or two.”

And testing helped settle one long-standing Web question early on, to Wajer’s relief. “For as long as I’ve been here, there’s been this dispute as to what converts better, a picture of a baby or a picture of a pregnant woman,” she says.

As it turns out, the baby photo does much better. “Pregnancy is a very aspirational time,” Wajer says. “People want to see pictures of the beautiful child they hope to bring home. I was especially glad to get that issue wrapped.”