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 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.

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.

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-me.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.

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.

About The Author
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, Kalena manages Search Engine College - 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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