Google website optimizer. What’s that all about?

by Cristian Antohe. 44 Comments -

Trying to find the best layout or keywords we look at out competition, ask colleagues and friends for their opinion, spend countless hours building the perfect banner. But how do we know if it’s effective. With Google Website Optimizer we can now test different solutions and find out which one converts better!

Designers and developers are constantly scratching their head, trying to find that perfect layout, the best keywords, what color make users more willing to interact with your website or what banner design is most effective at generating clicks.

We make deductions based on our project specifications and create “the best” possible version and then publish it. However, no matter how experienced we are, users are not always predictable and our “best” version could turn out to be the worst.

With Google Website Optimizer Tool, we can now measure the effectiveness of different solutions, by allowing you to test different versions of your site content and thus determining what will best attract users and lead them to convert on your site.

The Experiment

cwc_tshirtThe idea is that we’ll have two landing pages for our fictional product, a “Cats who Code” tshirt. Each page will have a different background color (red and blue). By the end of the experiment we’ll know which page converted best by the number of orders from each page.

To start using this free tool you’ll need a Google account. After we sign in we can just go ahead and create a new experiment.

create_experiment

There are two types of experiments you can do:

  • A/B Experiment – The simplest way to start testing fast. This method compares the performance of entirely different versions of a page.
  • Multivariate Experiment – The most robust way to test lots of ideas. This method compares the performance of content variations in multiple locations on a page.

We’ll go with the A/B experiment, as that is faster and easier to set up.

Luckily, the Google Website Optimizer team has made this quite easy to understand and implement. We’ll need three things before we can continue:

  1. The initial page you would like to test. I’ll call this ‘index.html’. This is the blue version one.
  2. The alternate version of our test page. This will be called ‘index-red.html’. These URLs could be bookmarked by your users, so after your experiment finishes, you may want to keep these URLs valid.
  3. Identify your conversion page. In out example that will be represented by the ‘order.html’ page. For you this might be the page displayed after a user signs up for a newsletter, or fills out a contact form.

Once we have these three pages setup we can go forward and build our experiment. Google will ask you where your pages are located.

identify

Setting up the JavaScript code

The next step is basically the most “technically challenging” one. We have two options: your web team will install and validate JavaScript tags or You will install and validate the JavaScript tags. Since most of us like to do things our self we’ll go ahead and insert the JavaScript.

validation

There are 4 JavaScript codes that you need to copy-paste into your 3 pages. To make matters easy the Website Optimizer team included some really user friendly code validations that will tell you the exact error in case you get one, so instead of spending time searching for a typo you can set up your experiment fast and painless.

The code will have to be inserted inside:

  • The Original page – at the beginning and at the end of it
  • The Variation page – at the end of the source code
  • The Conversion page – also at the end of the source code

invalid

Now all we have to do is start it and wait for the results to come in. It’s recommended to have at least 100 conversions per page or it won’t be conclusive.

Learn More

While this is a simple example, you now have some basic knowledge to build on. Google not only developed an extremely useful tool to help your website convert, but also produced all the needed information to educate it’s users, so even if you don’t want or need Google Website optimizer, just by reading the documentation you’ll definitely learn something new.

If you’re still not convinced visit the Workout page from Google, where 4 case studies are presented with insight on the workflow and actual results from real life projects.

Comments (44) - Leave yours

  4. Wheelchair Guide said:

    That is a pretty cool service. I do this kind of stuff on my own sometimes, but it would be neat to let google handle most of the work. Really though, it benefits Google as well, because they are get a lot of interesting data to work with…

  5. It’s About Time » links for 2009-07-03 said:

    [...] Google website optimizer. What’s that all about? Trying to find the best layout or keywords we look at out competition, ask colleagues and friends for their opinion, spend countless hours building the perfect banner. But how do we know if it’s effective. With Google Website Optimizer we can not test different solutions and find out which one converts better! (tags: google webdesign developer optimization seo) [...]

  6. edos said:

    I already use the Google Website Optimizer and it works well, but which is better i mean which one will bring more visitors through search engines, is it optimizing a webpage for keywords or trying to increase sites pagerank by getting more backlinks ?

  7. Roshi said:

    I am hearing about it for the 1st time and i am sure that it is a very good tool and will be helpful to many over here. Has anyone used it? can i know about it drawbacks and positive points?

  11. Miller said:

    what does it do exactly ? searching for the keywords or listening click events of links which are hit by user ?

    i use my own tracker for those ones and works well.

  13. HFdesign Webdesign said:

    @Miller, Google Website Optimizer makes it possible to check different selections of your site and the influence on performance they have. Based on the number of conversion per X number of visitors.

  17. Mark said:

    “With Google Website Optimizer we can “not” test different solutions and find out which one converts better!”

    For some reason that made me laugh!

    Maybe i’m just childish but it’s certainly a good tool, I’ve known about it for a while but this has reminded me to actually experimanet with it properly.

  19. Shawn Hooghkirk said:

    Cristian,

    Just when you think you have utilized all the tools you have available, something else comes along (which has been out longer than I thought). Thanks for writing the article, and good luck with your conversions!

  22. BucksCountryLawyer said:

    I appreciate your efforts of sharing knowledge. I can easily understand that it is good tool but still I’m looking to know what are its merits and demerits. I hope you will explain it further so that many people get some benefits from you mentioned tools as well as ideas.

  23. tim wilson said:

    i have been using google optimizer for a long time. it’s a great tool but you need to know how to drive it properly. spent a little bit of time reading up on it before enabling it and you’ll be better off in the long run.

  26. Rohit said:

    wow nice post, I knew about Google website optimizer from long time but didn’t gave it a try yet now after reading this blog post I’d like to give it a try :) Keep writing nice post Cristian

  27. Ruri said:

    I never know this tools before. But when I try, I think this is useful for SEO. The 2nd tools could be useful to track sales. but This kind of tools already created by many people.

  28. Catrin W said:

    Thanks for explaining this really great service from Google. I was thinking it was something very complicated, but now i figured it’s quite easy to follow and install.

  32. Tim said:

    To be honest I never understood how this tool works. Unfortunately, your great tutorial didn’t help me to understand how to use this tool.

  33. Jay said:

    Interesting – thanks! I was thinking of split-testing recently, as, after I implemented a new theme, I had to redo my AdSense ads: they didn’t look too good in the old design, but looked gross in the new design (they are still not 100%, but it appears some colors don’t mix…). However, I got clicks on the old ones (both on the old and new site) and now I need to wait and see how much the new ads convert. But then, I can not compare as there might be seasonal influences (holiday, less traffic etc.), so I wanted to be able to display the same page with different AdSense banners – both layout and positioning. As different layouts are served randomly, after enough visits one could select the best converting one.

    I’m going to add Optimizer to my account, but I haven’t found if they allow/provide this – if not, would you know of any service that could do this (basically you need some script that displays a variant of the same page ‘randomly’ – ie, the odd visitors (1,3,5…) get to see variant A, the even ones (2,4,6…) get variant B etc.).

  35. Kenny S. said:

    “With Google Website Optimizer Tool, we can now measure the effectiveness of different solutions, by allowing you to test different versions of your site content and thus determining what will best attract users and lead them to convert on your site.”

    This is such a cool tool. I can’t wait to use this for my own site. Can you post some tips on how to troubleshoot some issues when using this tool?

    “The next step is basically the most “technically challenging” one. We have two options: your web team will install and validate JavaScript tags or You will install and validate the JavaScript tags. Since most of us like to do things our self we’ll go ahead and insert the JavaScript.”

    I’m kind of a newbie in using JavaScript. Do you have some tips on how to properly install and validate JavaScript tags? I really don’t have a web team so I’m doing everything on my own.

  40. Chandan said:

    That’s really great! I tried google webmaster tool only to submitting sitemap and to know related problem with my blog. I am going to try this now.

    Thanks for sharing.

  43. James said:

    That’s really great! I tried google webmaster tool only to submitting sitemap and to know related problem with my blog. I am going to try this now.

  44. Jamie said:

    Admittedly, at first, I’m quite skeptical to use this tool as I don’t know how to really use it. But thanks for your clear tutorial and screenshots. I finally figured out how this thing works.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

Please respect the following rules: No advertising, no spam, no keyword in name field. Thank you!