This week I got an email from Google, saying that I had been accepted to take part in the Beta test of the website optimizer tool. Sad as it may seem, I had eagerly been awaiting this invitation. Having signed up for it back in December, it has been a long time coming. So what exactly is this new tool and how will it help me? Basically, it is Google’s answer to A/B split testing software to be used primarily in conjunction with Adwords, but I don’t see any reason why it also wouldn’t also work for testing pages used in an organic SEO campaign.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of A/B split (or multivariate) testing it basically involves the scientific testing of various parts of a web page such as images, headings, layout, buttons, navigation to work out which versions your users prefer, or better still, which one is most likely to result in a conversion. A/B testing is the simple test of changing just one element of a page against another to see which works best, whereas multivariate is the equivalent of thousands of A/B split tests. It’s like post click marketing, helping you make the most ($$$) of the traffic that PPC and Search has driven to your site.

There have always been plenty of pieces of software out there to take care of this for you, but none that I am aware of that fit in nicely with Google Adwords and that are free! Welcome Google Website Optimizer!

So lets get started. I am running a PPC campaign on www.sampletest.co.in, so I will use this as my test subject.

The first thing that I need to do is decide which landing page I am going to use for the test. I have been directing traffic from the PPC campaign to an article on social bookmaking that I wrote, so I will use that page. The aim of the page is to educate users and to induce them to request more information about this topic. So how do I work out how many parts of this page to change? The Optimizer tool tells me that I can test up to 1000 variations in one go, but the more variations I have the longer it will take to get meaningful results. In fact the length of an experiment is determined by 5 key factors:

1). Number of combinations
2). Conversation rate
3). Website traffic
4). Estimated conversion rate lift
5). Percentage of participation
These points should all be fairly self explanatory - i.e. the higher the number of combinations the longer the test duration; the lower the conversion rate the longer the duration etc.

I am now going away to work on the two versions of my page, so will let you know how I get on!

I decided to keep my first multivariate test as simple as possible, by making just a few small changes to this page:

Social Bookmarking

The first step is to decide which areas of the page will be changed. I am splitting the page into three sections – headline, image and text. I then tell Google Website Optimizer the page URLs of the test page and also one conversion page URL. In this case, I am going to use the contact us page.

2). Tagging the test page

The next step involves adding tags to the specific sections of the test page for which I am going to test the content variations. In English, this means I insert special tags around the heading, image and content that I have changed.

Although this site already uses Google analytics to track visitors and conversions, I also need to add some extra tagging to the conversion (contact us) page so that I will be able to tell whether people came from the test page or other areas of the site. To be honest this is the hardest part so far and a bit of hassle.

Also, adding the Google script to this page had made it non XHTML 1.0 compliant, which the rest of the site is. This is something that will need to be sorted out by the Commerce Tuned CSS specialist. I would have thought that since Google seems to love W3C compliance and well formed code; it would give it users something that was also compliant?

Once I have done this, Google Optimizer goes off to check everything is set-up correctly. After a few more tweaks, I manage to get everything set up to its satisfaction. I now have pages very heavy with script that are non compliant, but Google Website Optimizer seems to like them so that must be OK!

3). Create Variations

For each section that I have tagged (headline, image and content), I now create a variation. This is done within the Google software and is very straight forward. I literally click the variation I wish to change and then a little box pops up into which I type the name of my variation (for example heading 2). I then use a CMS (Content Management System) style interface that allows to me to add text and HTML in order to create the actual variation. It is even possible to preview the changes on the live test page to make sure everything is OK before saving them.

4). Review test settings and launch

After checking a summary of settings and variations, the test is launched. I have set-up some Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts that will land on the test page, so that should be a great way to direct traffic to the page and to monitor what happens.

After I have gathered some data, I will review the Google Optimizer reports and see how the experiment went. It will be interesting to find out if this tool is actually likely to help me as an SEO person, help my client towards a higher conversion rate.