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Testing Your Website Using Google Website Optimizer

As a digital marketing expert, one of your primary tasks is creating, testing, measuring, and starting the cycle over again. Fortunately, there are a number of analytics tools to help you test and measure the performance of your website.

Google Website Optimizer is a tool you can use for both A/B testing and multi-variate testing. You can test two choices, or you can setup multiple options and figure out which one converts highest. You can use this tool to increase your website’s conversion rate – you can turn more visitors into customers and increase your sales.

For example, you could create two headlines for a product and then see which one sells more products.

One of the most popular tools is Google Website Optimizer as it is free and integrated into Google Analytics and Google Adwords. As Google describes it,

Website Optimizer is a tool that can help you improve the effectiveness of your website and your return on your investment by testing if changes to your website’s content are more effective in getting conversions. You choose what web pages or parts of a page you’d like to test — headline, image, promo text – and we’ll run an experiment on a portion of your site traffic to determine which content on your site users respond to best. When we’ve collected enough data, we’ll provide you with reliable reports and a suggested course of action in order to optimize your site for maximum business results.

Why You Should Increase Your Conversion Rate

There are a number of reasons you will want to increase your conversion rate – beyond the desire for more sales. These include:

  1. Internet marketing is expensive. Paid search and display advertising is expensive and reaching the right eyeballs is difficult. Once you get them onto your page, you will want as many to buy as can.
  2. Your website is not as good as it can be. Every website has room for improvement – there are things you can do to increase sales. A lot of websites are losing a lot of potential sales due to a poor job selling their products. A/B testing will help you one test at a time.
  3. Testing is free – but the results are worth a lot of money. Google Website Optimizer brings your technology costs to $0, but it doesn’t tell you what to test, it just automates the measurement of your tests.

Google Website Optimizer is a great tool to use for testing your website and maximizing your conversion rate.