Website Marketing Directory — Search Engine Optimisation — Melbourne, Sydney, Australia

Published Monday 24th September, 2007

The first major update to Google's Website Optimizer has been released.

This update, named A/B split experiments, enables faster optimization of your website and vastly improved conversion rates.

Firstly, for those of you unfamiliar to Google's Website Optimizer, it is a tool that can assist you in enhancing the effectiveness of your website in order to get a return on your investment.

The new addition of the A/B experiments application enables you to test the performance of entirely different versions of a page. That is, you can change the content, look, feel or general layout of a page while comparing it to your original test page.

The overall objective of this comparative exercise is to get a sense of which version users respond to best.

The process of employing such a test involves the following stages:

(1) Identify test page you want to test and determine which page you consider to be the goal for users to reach

(2) Work with marketing team to determine what exactly you want to test

(3) Html tags will then need to be added to test and conversion pages. Your webmaster then modifies the HTML of test and conversion pages (how-to instructions set out in installation guide)

(4) Step Three will then enable the generation of default content so that the original code will already be present when you progress to creating variations in the next step

(5) At this point you can review the different combinations of your page before the experiment goes live - this can be achieved via the "preview" feature.

(6) Website Optimizer will monitor combination progression in terms of which combinations lead to the most conversions and how each individual variation performed.

(7) This marks the end of the process performed by Website Optimizer until you run a new experiment with different variations on your site.

This form of testing is appropriate in the following instances: (a) your page traffic is relatively low (<1000 impressions a week) or (b) you simply want to alter the position of content within a page or the general layout altogether.

Evidently a very useful tool adept at monitoring user responses to different versions of a page in order to increase conversion rates and subsequently ROI.

Click here to view a slideshow illustrating the various Website Optimizer functions

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