How to Leverage Google Website Optimizer

Website Optimizer is a tool that tests variations of your webpages to determine the most effective content that will lead to increased conversion rates and visitor quality metrics. You begin by choosing parts of your page that you would like to test including; headlines, images, text, layout, or design. After running a Website Optimizer experiment on your site, you will be able to identify what change, or combination of changes, led to the biggest impact on your bottom line.

Here are 6 tips for leveraging the Google Website Optimizer tool:

1. Develop goals and benchmarks
Whether you’re interested in content or design, take time to think about what you really what to
learn from experiments. It’s important to pay attention to your current site and establish a
benchmark to work with. Pay attention to the number of visitors that your site receives per year,
the percent who go past the home page, the percent who become customers and the average
time on site.

2. Choose a test
Four main tests:

• Before and After - Track performance on a page, make a change, see if performance improved

• A/B - Splitting the traffic between 2 or more published pages and tracking which one gets the most conversions
  

• Multivariate - Carving up a page into a few sections, then trying different content in each section to create different version of the page
  

• Segmented, personalized, and/or experiential testing - Multivariate plus cross-tabbing results based on visitor characteristics and modification of the entire user experience
  

3. Prepare for testing
You will need the help of your webmaster or site administrator to input the experiment code on
your website. From here decide if you want to improve your; Titles, Images, Layouts, Selling
Propositions, Incentives, etc.

4. Be clear and concise
Make sure to use call-to-actions, headlines, titles, and formatting that emphasize the benefits of
your product/service. Sometimes eliminating content works well also. Keep your visitors
perspective in mind in terms of providing useful and action-inspiring content.

5. Pay attention to your combinations
Consider designing a series of different experiments that contain content elements you don’t
generally use. An example could be using a different text color that you haven’t used for body
text. Expect some combinations in every experiment to perform better than others. Just make
sure that all of your combinations are readable.

6. Produce reports
A Combination Report will show the performance results for all of the page combinations made
from the page section variations you created for your experiment and a Page Section Report
focuses on which variations to each page section performed best.