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A Beginner's Guide to Google Website Optimizer (Part 1)
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2008

We all know that the most effective Pay Per Click advertising
campaigns use landing pages that are matched perfectly to your
target search keywords and designed to follow through with the
idea or theme that your PPC ad has hinted at.

But how do you determine the effectiveness of those landing
pages? How do you know what design or page features will trigger
a better response in your audience and lead to more conversions?
The answer is that you don't, unless you test.

Benefits of Landing Page Testing

Whether they are a part of a PPC campaign or not, there are
countless benefits to testing your web site pages, including:

  • Improve the effectiveness of landing pages

  • Increase conversions / sales

  • Attract more leads / sign-ups

  • Increase time spent on your site by visitors

  • Reduce the Cost Per Acquisition of new customers

  • Eliminate guesswork. Improve your site design via
    information from your site's end users

  • Avoid staff disputes – let your customers decide what design
    elements should be changed

Google Website Optimizer

The Website Optimizer (http://services.google.com/
websiteoptimizer/) is a tool that allows marketers and
webmasters to test variations of pages on site visitors
automatically, to see which pages or variations of pages
perform the best (i.e. lead to the most conversions).

In April 2007, Google took their Website Optimizer tool out of
BETA and made it available to the general public. I had been
wanting to use Google Website Optimizer to test our landing
pages on Search Engine College for some time and I finally found
the time to trial it in October this year. After what we learned
from our experiments, I wish we'd implemented it months ago!

Website Optimizer helps you study the effects of different
content on your users and identify what users respond to best so
you can alter your web site accordingly. You can test any kind
of site elements from individual copy blocks and images to
complete page layouts. Perhaps the best thing about Website
Optimizer is that you can test ANY page on your site, including
landing pages you have designed for other PPC programs like
Yahoo or pages designed for non-PPC purposes.

Google Website Optimizer allows you to perform 2 different types
of tests:

1) A/B Split Testing
2) Multivariate Testing

You can view a 5 min overview of Website Optimizer here
(http://services.google.com/training/websiteoptimizeroverview/
2995095/index.html).


A/B Split Testing:

Through the use of code added to the "A" (original) page,
Google is able to serve the A/B variations (there can be many
more variations than just the "B" page) to site visitors and
then provide results of which page was most "successful",
commonly through reporting which of the A/B pages lead traffic
to a "results" page.

A/B Testing compares the performance of entirely different
versions of a page. Google suggests using it if:

  > your page traffic is fairly low (i.e. less than 1,000
    page views per week)

  > you want to move sections around or change the overall
    look of the page

In Figure 1, you can see an A/B Testing experiment being set up
in Website Optimizer.

< http://www.sitepronews.com/images2/figure1a.jpg >

Figure 1 – Website Optimizer A/B Experiment Set-Up


Setting Up A/B Experiments in Website Optimizer

To set up an A/B testing experiment in Google Website Optimizer,
you first need to prepare three things:

  1) Your "original" web page
  2) Your variation/s of this original
  3) Your conversion page (e.g. the "thank you for
     subscribing/purchasing" page)

In the example you see in Figure 1, we set up an experiment on
SearchEngineCollege.com consisting of our original page
(/add-me.shtml) and a single variation (/add-me2.shtml), with our
conversion page being /seo-starter-course-sample-download.shtml.

Next, you need to add some javascript to each of these pages to
enable Google to track your experiment. Then it's simply a
matter of uploading all your test pages and having Google
validate your URLs to confirm you've set up your experiment
correctly.

Multivariate Testing:

Testing can be made not only with A/B pages, but with different
possible versions of a single page.

This allows you to trial different types of layouts and page
text to see which combinations lead to the highest conversions
on your site.

Multivariate Testing compares the performance of content
variations in multiple locations on a page. Google suggests
using it if:

  > your page traffic is high (i.e. more than 1,000 page
    views per week)

  > you want to try multiple content changes in different
    parts of the page simultaneously

Setting Up Multivariate Experiments in Website Optimizer

To set up a Multivariate testing experiment in Google Website
Optimizer, you need to do the following:

  1) Choose the web page you wish to test.

  2) Decide with your marketing/technical teams which page
     sections you wish to test e.g. headline, image,
     call-to-action, copy etc.

http://www.sitepronews.com/images2/figure2a.jpg

Figure 2 – Website Optimizer Multivariate Experiment Set-Up


  3) Add the JavaScript code to your page's source code. This
     includes the Control Script, the Tracking Script and the
     Page Section Script.

  4) Identify your conversion page and add the Conversion Script
     to that page's source code.

  5) Upload your revised test and conversion pages.

  6) Validate your pages. If you've set up your experiment
     correctly, you will see a confirmation message.

  7) Create the code variations for each page section you are
     testing (see Figure 3).

  8) Review and launch your experiment.
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Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine
optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and
respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as
running a daily Search Engine Advice Column
(http://www.ask-kalena.com/), Kalena manages Search Engine
College (http://www.searchenginecollege.com/)- an online
training institution offering instructor-led short courses and
downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization
and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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