Google Website Optimizer More Information Overall Rating: Not Rated Pay Per Click Universe Recommends: AdWatcher - 100% Click Fraud Protection. Concerned about click fraud? Protect your online advertising dollars with the world's most trusted & accurate click fraud solution on the market today. AdWatcher will put a stop to competitors and fraudsters who are looking to drain your hard earned advertising budget. Test-Drive AdWatcher For FREE For 30 Days! Once you’ve got people to click on your PPC ad and they arrive at your website, your ultimate goal is to convert. Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free tool from Google that will help you test elements on your landing pages to see how well they are converting and how changes to different aspects of a page will affect conversions. You do not need to be an AdWords user to access and make use of the tool – you do need to open a free AdWords account, but need not be actively involved in any AdWords ad campaigns. Since its release in beta format in October 2006, GWO has garnered accolades in the search engine marketing world – there is even a “Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant” partner program. And indeed, it is easy to use and provides results that are actionable. There is a plethora of how-to information on GWO available on the Google website itself, with step-by-step directions and FAQs on every aspect, making it easy to implement without the necessity of totally understanding the nuts and bolts behind the multivariate testing scene. One great place to find links to high-quality, free GWO-related resources is www.grokdotcom.com, which includes “Getting Your First Google Website Optimizer Test Running in 10 Minutes,” a detailed guide for both newbies and long-time search marketers. In addition, Google ran an excellent beginner and intermediate webinar on using GWO in late October and early November 2007 that is archived on their website. Although there are other free A/B split and multivariate testing tools on the market, and a whole bunch of ones that range in price from cheap to incredibly expensive, the small business operator may very well find that GWO is more than sufficient for their needs. It’s an extremely powerful tool and with a little investment of time in learning how to manipulate the tool to its potential, you can be running tests as complex as your traffic allows in order to get results you can use on which headlines, copy, images, calls to action, pricing, etc. work best for your site. You can choose to test more than one conversion page to discover what elements encourage a visitor to move to other pages on your site or test changes that affect every page on your site (such as a change in navigation setup). Testing can be done even if your content is dynamic. With GWO you can run tests all the way from simple A/B testing of two different pages to comparing a whole combination of elements – does this headline work best or this headline with this copy and this image and this call to action? You do need to keep in mind that in order to run some of the more complicated multivariate testing, you will need adequate traffic and time to make the results actionable, just as you do with an advertising campaign itself. The reports that are generated from testing provide info not just on the number of conversions within the number of impressions, but also estimates of the conversion rate range, the probability (in a percent) that each trial page will beat the original in conversions, the probability that it will beat all of the other combinations tested, and the improvement in conversion rate. Conversion rates that decline are identified in red. The Page Section report breaks the data down by sections on the page. Although the main use for GWO is in A/B split testing and multivariate testing of the elements on a web page, GWO has some other testing parameters. The “Linger” test allows you to use time spent on a page as the goal for conversion, which can be useful for those with less traffic who find it difficult to get actionable data by using purchases as the conversion trigger. The “Click” scenario uses a click as the conversion trigger, so that you can test which landing page is best at making a visitor click on the goal (to download a white paper, sign up for a newsletter, etc.). The “Do Anything” scenario allows you to test engagement of visitors without tying it to a single goal. GWO is a definite winner for anyone wishing to investigate increasing conversions on their website, whether or not they use AdWords. But for advertisers, the benefits of GWO are worth investigating. It is an extremely powerful tool that is easy to use, quite broad in possible applications, and – best of all – is free. It won’t replace more complex testing tools, but if your budget won’t run to one of the leaders in multivariate testing, it’s certainly an option that has a lot going for it. |
