Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:39:44 by Matt Hopkins
Do you want to know if a new version of a landing or content page will out-perform the current version? Does your marketing manager think that a red "call to action" button would outperform the current blue one?
Wouldn't it be nice to have some way of testing the potential impact of changes like this before you actually replace a design or page completely?
For the past year or so, Google has had a tool called Website Optimizer that provides this sort of testing (A/B and multi-variant) but it has been available only to Adwords accounts. Last week, Google made it publicly available.
This is a truly excellent tool and I highly recommend that you try it out. You simply sign up with an existing Google account and create one of two types of "experiments":
1. A/B Testing. This is useful when you want to compare the performance of two or more content pages (e.g. landing pages). We recently ran tests on our landing pages for our PPC campaign with three different variations and discovered that one of the pages produced a 50% improvement in conversion rate over the other two!
2. Multi-variant Testing. This is useful if you want to test different attributes on single page. For example, let's say you have a page with product details, a call to action, and a perhaps user reviews. You may want to test to see what combination of factors converts/sells better - call to action on right, call to action on left, with reviews, without reviews, etc. Google's website optimizer will help you configure the page so that the various possibilities are created (dynamically) and after a period of testing, it will tell you which is the winning combination. Due to the number of variations, it may only be useful on sites with relatively high levels of traffic.
You can review reports on how the experiment is running and when you are ready, determine the best combination to run with.
The release of Google's Website Optimizer as an independent tool is fantastic news and we are working with a number of our search engine optimisation and PPC management clients to help them better understand how they can improve the conversion rates of their marketing campaigns / websites.
Matt Hopkins
Managing Director |
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