Google's free tool takes the guesswork out of web design
Posted 17 April 2007 at 10:14AM by Simon Dickson in Website development
Google's latest free service for advertisers could be a fabulous addition to any business operating online. Called the Website Optimizer (not to be confused with BT's Easy Site Optimizer), it lets you try out lots of different ideas for presenting your website, and puts some hard numbers on which ideas worked (or didn't).
'Multivariate testing', or 'A/B testing' is a process whereby you show different versions of the same basic page or information to your website audience; then you measure whether the users were more or less likely to buy your product, depending on which version they saw. It's fairly common practice among big-budget online businesses and their expensive ad agencies, but it can be a chore to set up.
Enter Google, which has a habit of reinventing things like this, making them (a) easy and (b) free. The Website Optimizer asks you to identify the page you want to experiment with, and the 'conversion page' which would constitute a success. So if you had a page promoting a special offer, the 'conversion page' might be the screen users see when they've pressed 'buy'. A few lines of pasted HTML and Javascript later, and we're ready to go.
You might want to try two or three different headlines on your test page, or a handful of different product photographs. Tell Google what they are, and it will start dropping them in randomly, each time someone visits the page in question - and tracking whether or not that person subsequently reaches the 'conversion page'. As time goes on, and the data builds up, you'll see a straightforward report presenting the hard evidence of which combination works best. Think about it: no more arguments in marketing meetings!
Naturally, the tool is only as good as the ideas you're testing; and you'll need to be getting decent traffic levels for the statistics to hold water. Plus, like a lot of Google tools, it's officially marked as a 'beta' test, so theoretically you shouldn't rely too much on it yet. But if you're serious about your company website, this is an absolutely fantastic addition to your armoury. (You'll need to sign up as a user of the 'Standard Edition' of Google's Adwords system, if you haven't done so already - I blogged about this the other week.)
Tags: google, multivariate testing, user testing, web design, website optimizer
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