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Google Website Optimizer: A Valuable Free Tool
Rick Henkin
Google Website Optimzer (GWO) is a free tool offered by Google for testing and optimizing your site content and design. It allows you to choose the pages and content you want to test, offer these alternatives to your visitors and see which does the better job of converting. While analytics will allow you to track the effectiveness of your content in converting visitors to customers, this tool from Google will allow you to test the content itself. What kind of testing will GWO do?GWO uses two types of testing: A/B testing (also known as split testing) This is a very simple and easy way to test different versions of the same page or different versions of the elements on that page (headlines, images, calls-to-action, location of elements, etc.). Your visitors are divided into 2 groups with half of them being steered toward the original and half of them being steered toward the alternative version. Whichever variation leads to more conversions (sign-ups, purchases, etc.) is declared the winner and becomes the control page for the next round of testing. Multivariate testing This type of testing allows you to test multiple variables on your page at the same time. You might decide that you want to test different headlines, images and call to action buttons. With a multivariate test you can actually try different combinations of these 3 items at the same time to see which gives you the better conversion rate. As each new visitor lands on your page, GWO will display a different combination of elements. Because multivariate tests are more complex than A/B testing, they usually require higher page traffic to obtain a statistically valid result. The Google Website Optimizer TourWhile GWO is a free tool and can certainly get you started, there are paid services which might offer a more comprehensive solution for your website. One thing to keep in mind is that your results are only as good as the items you choose to test, whether you do it yourself or hire an outside firm. ARTICLE DATE: 2009-06-07 REVISED DATE: Share this Article as a Tweet on Twitter
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