Testing your site with the Google Website Optimizer

Posted by: Creative Thirst

Have you ever wondered which image would motivate your users to take action? Would the image of the product peek the interest of your web visitors or would more visitors buy if they saw your product in it’s natural environment and in use by people just like them? Or is the offer really he most important thing? Or maybe it’s just the price? Realistically it’s a combination of all of these things and more, which is the basis of persuasive design.

Well you can stop wondering because Google has just released a new tool called the Website Optimizer which helps you improve the effectiveness of your website in getting a return on your investment, currently the Optimizer is still in the beta stage ( as of April 2007) but sign-ups are open. What the Optimizer allows internet marketers to do is test different versions of a landing page to determine what the most effective elements are or combination of elements. This allows design to be used strategically enabling your site to motivate your web users and achieve higher conversion rates.

Essentially the Optimizer is a free A/B Testing tool where you can set up different versions of a landing page. On each version you can test different headlines, images, and text to examine which page has a higher performance for your specific visitors.

Once data on all the different versions in your test have been gathered Google presents the results in the form of a combination report and a page section report. Each report provides different insight into how responsive your visitors are to the combination of tested elements on your site. With this knowledge you can learn two things. First, what elements work and which don’t work for your customers. This newfound knowledge can be leveraged on future marketing campaigns for all areas of your brand communications. Additionally, by learning how well a particular combination of design elements performed in a real world environment you can then easily develop a more successful landingpage and maximize your marketing results by determining what will best attract your unique users and lead them to convert on your site.

The sample combination report below shows the performance results for several combinations of test pages for content as a whole in comparison of the original control page design.



The sample page section report below in contrast focuses on which variations to each page section performed best.