Increase Conversions Without Spending Money: Google’s Website Optimizer
Testing your website’s landing pages is one way to increase conversions without spending more on advertising. Certain design and page elements can improve conversion rates by 100% or more over time!
Basic Intro to using Google’s Website Optimizer to test your website
To get started with Website Optimizer, first log into your Google AdWords account. Click on “Website Optimizer, just below the tabs at the top:
You’ll be shown a table with a list of your current experiments. Experiments are the separate tests that you are running, for example one landing page versus another. Since it’s your first time, you’ll click on “Create An Experiment”.
Two Types of Tests:
A/B Experiment
If you’re new to Website Optimizer, A/B Testing will be your first task. It’s less complicated than Multivariate Testing, and you don’t have to have a ton of traffic for it to be effective. A/B Testing allows you to test two entirely different landing pages against each other. This is useful if you’re planning on redesigning your site, for example, and you’re not sure whether a blue background or a red background gets the best results. Or if you’d like to know if more people sign up for your service if the form is on the right side or on the left, the A/B test is a great way to find out. It’s also a good way to prove to your boss that things are working. The Optimizer will give you a report of the results from each landing page you do.
A/B Testing doesn’t mean you only get two options, either. You can test several variations against each other. If you’re not getting much traffic, though, you’ll probably want to limit your testing options in order to see quantifiable results faster.
To run an A/B experiment, click “Create.” You’ll continue on to a checklist with the following items:
1.
Choose the page you would like to test
Examples of potential test pages could be your homepage or a product detail page.
2.
Create and publish different versions of your test page at unique URLs so that Website Optimizer can randomly display different versions to your users. These URLs could be bookmarked by your users, so after your experiment finishes, you may want to keep these URLs valid.
3.
This is an existing page on your website that users reach after they’ve completed a successful conversion. For example, this might be the page displayed after a user completes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or fills out a contact form.
Once you’ve completed the steps, click “Continue.” You’ll be asked to name your experiment and then identify where your pages are. You’ll need to have already uploaded your variations to your server.
If your pages aren’t on the web, Website Optimizer will say it cannot find them, and you’ll need to check the URL or make sure you have uploaded them correctly. When you’re ready, click “Continue.”
You’ll be asked who will install the Javascript tags that identify your test and conversion pages. We’ll assume that you are doing this:
Continue, and you’ll be given little javascript code snippets to paste into your pages. Whenever it says to paste the code at the beginning of your page, make sure to paste it right after the <body> tag, not before. Whenever it says to paste the code at the end of your page, make sure to paste it right before the </body> tag.
Now, upload your pages with the script in them and click “Validate:”
If the pages don’t validate, check to make sure they uploaded correctly. Sometimes you need to wait a minute for it to recognize the new pages.
Voila! You’re done setting up the experiment! Now, it will gather data whenever someone lands on your landing page from any of your ads. The code will rotate which page users arrive at, and it even keeps track so repeat visitors don’t get different versions of your site (so they don’t get confused!). After a while, you’ll be able to view a sample report like this:
(As you can see, Variation 1 really killed the original!)
To view this report, click on “Website Optimizer” and then “View Report” by the name of your experiment in the table:
Multivariate Experiment
A Multivariate Experiment is taking the A/B test a little bit further. This is the experiment you want to run if you’re trying to change multiple things on different parts of the page simultaneously. You’ll want to be getting 1,000 or more views a week for this to be effective. This is for advanced testing, but Google does a pretty good job of walking you through it.
You start at the same spot as A/B Testing: create an experiment in Website Optimizer, only this time choose Multivariate Experiment. AdWords will walk you through the following steps:
1. Identify experiment pages
1a. Plan your experiment
2. Add JavaScript tags to experiment pages
3. Create variations
4. Review experiment settings and launch
5. View Report
You can see an example of Google’s multivariate experiment on its Adwords homepage in our previous post on the subject.
Constant testing with Website Optimizer can increase your conversions by over 100%. We’ve seen cases where conversions have doubled or tripled just because of the layout – not even the content – of a landing page. Why are users finicky like that? I guess figuring that out is all part of marketing.
Read MoreThe Importance of Testing – Even Google Does It
Probably the most fundamentally important task in PPC Management is testing. Split or multivariate testing of advertising copy, landing page designs, and pricing points is just the beginning. Capitalization, ad position, and the positioning of elements on your webpage can all impact your conversions, and that eventually means your bottom line.
Constant testing and improvement is vitally important to a successful pay per click campaign, or any element of web business for that matter. Yet it is probably the most overlooked and under-executed part of the web business process. At the end of the day, testing is one of the key ingredients that separates winners from losers.
Google, for example, tests everything before it changes something. The following screenshots were captured by QualityScores as AdWords was experimenting with a multi-variate test (I think the test is still live as of 10/6/08). It looks like they were testing these elements of the page:
The ‘get started’ button – the text on the button “Click to begin”, “Start Now”, and one other text variation that I haven’t seen yet…and the color of the button is being tested.
The diagram of how AdWords works – 3 illustration variations…see them all in the screen shots below.
The headline in the upper left - 3 variations “Advertise your business on Google”, “Grow your business on Google”, and “Accountable Advertising with Google” as seen in the screenshots below.
I haven’t captured all variations – there are at least 9 variations that I can tell. There might be 12 to 15…in any case, multivariate testing is important!
Google is using their website optimizer to conduct this test. Testing is easy with the website optimizer!
The moral of the story: Test, test test! And if testing is too big of a pain for you to keep doing, then we’ll do it for you. Testing and improvement is part of our culture. 
What Pages Should You Test First?
I attended my first webinar yesterday and I have to admit I was pretty impressed. I’m going to start attending more and blogging about the items I thought were important to note and related to improving ROI. The webinar I attended was an AMA Webinar called Landing Page Optimization: A Process using Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.
You can find the webinar here and the slides here. The two presenting panelists were: John Hossack, VP Bus Dev and Usability at VKI Studios and Tom Leung, Business Product Manager at Google (Website Optimizer).
I have a lot of notes but I think this was one of my favorite takeaways from the presentation. In Tom Leung’s slides he had this graph that visually displayed which pages you should spend a majority of your time testing to increase conversions (I took the liberty of redesigning it a little for the blog):
The blue/green circle is where we should spend our time with tests. It is clear that high traffic, high priority pages should be the pages you test first.
This image makes a lot of sense and most of us would probably say “duh!”; but, what is unique to me is the thought that we need to spend some time testing other parts of the site even if it has already been optimized or if it is deemed unimportant (privacy page?).
One of my favorite examples of making the legal terms page engaging and humorous is Homestar Runner’s legal page…check it out! Stick around for 20 seconds or so…I bet that small change is enough to keep people engaged with the site even if it wasn’t tested.
Don’t get caught up testing the low traffic, low priority pages – focus on improving the pages that will have the biggest impact on the bottom line first, then have fun with the other pages.
Decrease Landing Page Load Time by 500% With 3 Lines Of Code!
This was almost the title of one of the top del.icio.us bookmarks today – and I haven’t tested it yet but I am very excited about the prospects of what it could do for longer landing pages or heavy css/js websites so I had to share it now!
I will post results soon but I would love your comments:
Original article was on Acid Drop and it was entitled: Improve website load time by 500% with 3 lines of code. Read that post and apply it to your landing pages to decrease your landing page load time now!
Huge hat tip to Leon Chevalier at Acid Drop!
I thought I would add one more thing – these are the tools Leon used to measure page load time and he displayed a couple screen shots from these programs. We recommend downloading these to conduct your own tests:
Don’t forget to check out the comments on AcidDrop – excellent fixes for WordPress are in there.
We will be posting our landing page results within the next couple weeks!
One more thing – we HAVE tested flash load vs. bounce rate with one client (technically a small sample in a VERY competitive industry) and we noticed that almost 50% of our clicks were NOT being captured by analytics because the analytics js was at the bottom of the page – we concluded that a page that takes longer than 5 to 7 seconds to load will lose 50% of the audience before the page is even finished loading! Ouch!
Read MorePPC Management: Create Dynamic Landing Pages In 15 Minutes Or Less
This is the second installment in our QualityScores PPC Management series where we expose some of the best pay per click secrets ever!
If you missed the introductory installment, you can find it here.
___________________________________________
This secret will rock your world – it does not need great copy to hype it up because the results will scream success!
*Note 3/31/08 – I changed the first ucwords in the dynamic code to htmlentities for security purposes…I recommend you use htmlentities as shown in this blog post.
Without further ado, here is your quick 4 step guide to making a dynamic landing page with PHP in 15 minutes or less:
1. Open your landing page in your favorite editor and make sure it is saved as php OR html.
Copy and paste this line to your .htaccess file if you are going to use an html (or htm) landing page:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html
Now you can run php scripts in your htm(l) files.
2. Copy and Paste the following code into your landing page’s Title and content. Put your original content (the word or phrase you are replacing) in the string “Your Original Info Here”:
<?php
if ($_GET['kw'])
{echo htmlentities($_GET['kw']);}
else
{echo ucwords("Your Original Info Here");}
?>
For example, I want to replace the Title on the QualityScores landing page so I would use this code for my Title:
The title would display the original content if somebody landed on the page without querying a keyword:
And if somebody came to our page from a specific keyword in the destination url, our Title would look like this:
This is the code I would use for one of our original content questions or headlines:
<p>Are You Looking For
<php?
if ($_GET['kw'])
{echo htmlentities($_GET['kw']);}
else
{echo ucwords(“High Quality PPC Management”);}
?>
?</p>
This question would be displayed if somebody landed on the page without querying a keyword:
Are You Looking For High Quality PPC Management?
And this question would be displayed after somebody clicked on our ad from the query “PPC Management Services”:
Are You Looking For PPC Management Services?
Using ucwords in the code will capitalize the first letter of every word in the search query or string…, you can simply remove ucwords and the corresponding parenthesis () if you don’t want to have the first letter capitalized on each word – your code would look like this:
<?php
if ($_GET['kw'])
{echo $_GET['kw'];}
else
{echo "your original info here";}
?>
This is particularly useful if you are using it in a paragraph of regular text. You can format this so your searcher’s query can be bold or italicized or underlined, making it appear more relevant and useful to the user.
3. Save, Upload, and Test your landing page.
To test it, simply type in your landing page url -
www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.php?kw=your+search+query
Pretty freaking sweet, huh?
4. Now go to any ad platform and simply enter this in your destination url on your ads:
www.yoursite.com/yourlandingpage.php?kw={keyword}
Example -
My landing page is already edited using the steps listed above…so I went to AdWords to play with the Quality Score on a highly irrelevant search query. Please excuse or have fun with my mild sense of humor…
I started a new campaign and a new adgroup using the keyword homestar poopsmith. 
The destination url (our company name is now QualityScores – we used to be known as apollo sem):
The live ad:
And this is what I get when I click through the ad after searching for Homestar Poopsmith (click on the screenshot to enlarge):
The entire page is technically about PPC Management. I added the dynamic text to two headlines on the page…one at the beginning of the content and one towards the middle of the page. The title is also dynamic.
Here is my quality score for the broadly matched term homestar poopsmith:
How will this help you?
Your landing pages will be more relevant to your users AND Google; your quality scores should go up, your costs should come down, and we can expect you to convert more visitors!
Recommendations
Use this pay per click secret with caution! Your results can and will vary!
If you are an ecommerce site with a specific product, you will probably want to carefully include the dynamic search query in your content and titles – maybe you will use empty or open questions like “Are You Looking For (Keyword)?” “This is the closest match…and we think it will be a perfect fit for you because…”
Everybody that implements this secret should aggressively use negatively matched keywords in your campaigns and ad groups.
Creating a dynamic landing page might compromise your SEO strategy. We generally recommend that you duplicate your SEO landing pages (if you are using them for PPC) and place them into a separate file or directory for you to advertise with. Add the “advertisement” directory to the robots.txt file as a disallowed directory to avoid some duplicate content issues.
You will be able to view the exact search terms people are using by filtering through your landing page results in Analytics – another useful way to find negative match keywords.
That’s a wrap! Now You can Create A Dynamic Landing Page in 15 Minutes or Less with PHP!
The originating source of our knowledge regarding this post came from this 2006 Digital Point Forum post.
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