Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is a great tool to fine tune your and test the conversion rate of landing pages within your website. Using the Google Website Optimizer you can test different web site combination's and layouts. It will also allow you to learn how to improve your conversion rate and increase your ROI. This is achieved by testing various combination's of landing pages and implementing the one that is most successful.

A well built web page is the key element to determining whether or not you will achieve conversions. After arriving on your website a user decides with a few seconds whether to stay on your site. Research has shown that unless the user finds a compelling reason to stay within the first few seconds they will leave your site. It is critical that your web page makes a first good impression.

Your first goal is to drive traffic and click to your website. The next goal is to retain that traffic and keeping the user on your page and getting them to take the desired action on your site - i.e.: making a purchase, downloading information, or filling out a form.

Once on your site one of the first areas of focus is your headline, images and graphics, simple promotional text and a call to action (i.e.. - add to shopping cart; click here to download; etc).There is not a perfect formula to designing your website, you will have to test various combinations of content and layout to see what creates the most success for you. The Google Website Optimizer can help you do that.

Using the Website Optimizer, you can perform two different types of tests.

• A/B split testing
• Multivariate testing

Which one you you use will depend on what you want to test and one test should work better for you than the other.

A/B testing will basically compare the performance of entirely different versions of your web pages. You would want to use this type of test if your page traffic is low (less than 1000 views a week)and/or you wanted to change the overall look and feel of your page by moving different sections around.

Multivariate testing will basically compare the performance of content variations in multiple locations on your page. Consider using this type of testing if your page traffic is higher than a 1000 views a week and you want to try multiple content changes on different parts of your page at the same time.

Under the multivariate testing you may want to try three different attention grabbing headlines. The Google Website Optimizer makes it easy for you to track the results of the different variations of your experiment. The steps involved are:

1. Identify the test page and define which page is the goal of what you want your users to reach.
2. Define which sections of your page to test such as the headline or image.
3. Then create the variations in the code using the Google Website Optimizer program.
4. Review the different combinations by using the preview feature.
5. Run the test.

Google will run various combinations of your test and track the results for you and let you know which combination led to the most conversions as well as letting you know how each combination performed.You can then run reports that the website optimizer generates for you to determine what changes made the biggest impact in your conversions.

Overall, by using the Google Website Optimizer, you can learn how to improve your conversion rates, increase your return on investment and retain more customers.

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