Google Website Optimizer
An Innovative Design Testing Tool by Google
Many web designers directionlessly make changes to the website in a desperate attempt to increase traffic. But with the Google Website Optimizer tool, it is possible to scientifically experiment with multiple designs and find out which design will be most effective. Using Google’s free Website Optimizer to test and optimize site content and design, one can easily add to the value of existing websites and increase traffic.
For those who are still not aware, Google Web Optimizer is Google’s free content testing and optimization tool. It facilitates testing different variations of a web site content to determine which will be the most productive at getting the desired results. By giving website designers the tools needed to test the website content, Google is also improving user experience on the internet as a whole.
How Google Web Optimizer works?
Web design process generally involves few people sitting together and arbitrarily choosing a design they think is best. The decision is obviously not based on any scientific method. Tom Leung, product manager for Google Website Optimizer, opines it is not always easy to know what drives traffic without the aid of a web testing tool like Website Optimizer. Google Website Optimizer lets the designer make changes/improvements with some degree of scientific exactitude.
Google Website Optimizer is a tool to evaluate which changes are good, which are neutral and which are bad. Google Website Optimizer has two alternate types to experiment with - A/B, which switches between two page designs and multivariate function whereby the web designer can test multiple elements such as different headlines and pictures to see which one works best.
With the Website Optimizer tags in place on all web pages, a percentage of visitors are presented with the original page and another percentage of visitors are presented with an alternate design. After a few days, the designer can view reports on the experiment to see which design resulted in higher traffic. Instead of guessing which website content and design attract more visitors, Google Website Optimizer will select the better one.
Salient features of Google Web Optimizer:
- Completely eliminates the trial and error approach while designing web sites.
- Tests the pages and content including headlines, images, text and alternate designs.
- Helps the designer to determine the winning combination of web content and design resulting in maximum number of conversions.
- Allows the web designer to carry out simultaneously many of the optimization tests.
- Reduces loss of prospective customers caused by ineffective landing pages.
- Lets one know which version of each page brought in the most customers.
- Benefits marketers, search and display advertisers, publishers, and web designers.
These features are not new but they have been synchronized to produce much better results. Many web experts argue that Google web optimizer is an advanced form of Google Analytics. So familiarity with Google analytics will make one understand Google website optimization technique better.
Some Hints for Using Google Web Optimizer
- It is worthwhile to set up test experiments on a low-traffic page to gain familiarity with the Google Optimizer Tool. However, when ready to do a real test, it should be on a page that gets a lot of traffic. Pages with lots of traffic are generally faster to optimize than low traffic pages.
- Although the unique power of Google Optimizer is that one can test a bunch of things at the same time, the more things one tests at the same time, the longer the process will take to show results.
- Before testing features such as order completion for an e-commerce site, it is suggested to try something more common like adding an item to a shopping cart and clicking product details page.
- Consider designing a series of different experiments if there are conflicting ideas as some combinations in every experiment will understandably be an odd fit.
- To let experiments minimize customer impact, it is better to limit the scope of experimentation. Perhaps trying a phased approach using a sequence of small experiments may be the right approach.
The concept of Google Website Optimization revolves around the concept of split testing mechanism. The split test mechanism is used to measure the impact of content and texts on web pages which is broadly based on user response. This, however, is a time taking process. Google website optimizer simplifies this split testing and produces effective results in a short period of time.
Google Web Optimizer
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