Using Google’s Website Optimizer for the First Time
July 11, 2008
I must say that I am an avid lover of Google’s tools from Google Analytics to Google Trends and even iGoogle. Recently I had a chance to play around with Google’s Website Optimizer tool which allows you to run “experiments” on your website to see which page has a higher conversion rate and then you have more “actionable” data to base your company’s decision making on rather then just guessing blindly in the dark.
In order to use Google Website Optimizer you will need to first sign up for an account by clicking here (http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer). Once you login you your Google Website Optimizer account you will see that you have the option of running an A/B Split test or a Multivariate Testing on your web site or landing page. For those of you who are unsure of what A/B split testing is please read the article.
How do I create an experiment using Google’s Website Optimizer?
- Login to Google Website Optimizer
- Click on the “Create another Experiment” link
- Select the option of creating an A/B Experiment or a Multivariate Experiment (The difference as Google defines it is that A/B Experiments are for few then 1000 views a week and Multivariate Experiments are for web pages that receive greater than 1000 views per week)
- For the purposes of this article we select “A/B Experiment” and click the “create >>” button
- Click the check box on the A/B Experiment Checklist and click continue once you have everything mentioned on that list ready to go (The page you want to test, created alternate versions of the page and identify the conversion page)
- On this next page you will need to name your experiment, Identify the original and variation web page URL s and enter the URL for the conversion web page and click “Continue >>” button at the bottom of the page.
- Lastly you will need to add the JavaScript code to the pages (Original web page, Variation web page and Conversion web page) and click “Preview” to see how your experiment will look like when it runs.
Google’s Website Optimizer is an awesome tool in providing actionable information about the design of a web page and how visitors user it. I hope you enjoyed the article as it has been a little while since i’ve written on the PureWebAnalytics blog.
Luc
Observing Traffic Spikes in Google Analytics
May 15, 2008
Naturally anyone who runs a web presence and more importantly analyzes the data of their web presence may encounter Traffic Spikes that occur on a given day. I found myself observing some days where articles I publish caused traffic to increase the day that they were published. At first I thought “This seems out of the ordinary!” and then left me to wonder “Why and How did this happen?” and “How can I duplicate this effect again?”
Google Analytics is very good at reporting the data that visitors to your website leave behind and put it into simple and easy to use graphs and charts. So you have the ability to capture the data but the real goal is to understand the data and make actionable decisions using that data. For instance this spike that I saw in my Google Analytics account I singled out the traffic for that particular day by clicking on down arrow beside the date range and then selecting the specific day that this traffic spike occurred on and then I clicked “Apply”. From here, you can select all the reports that are specific to that day and funnel out some of the “noise”. If we go to the “Traffic Sources Overview” you’ll notice that the pattern in the traffic being delivered and from there you can gain insights into why and how your website received the traffic that it did.
Luc
Multi-page Checkout vs. One Page Checkout – Time is money
May 7, 2008
In the e-commerce world, much like any other world, time is money. A great deal of e-commerce sites are built in such a way where you search for a product, click to “proceed to checkout” and then you enter the checkout process where you sometimes have to create a profile before you are able to buy the product you are interested in and then you have to enter your delivery information, what type of shipping you would like and then you credit card you would like to pay with and then lastly process the transaction.
Sounds tiring and I wonder if customers give up at certain points during the checkout. I can personally say that I have decided not to buy a product online before because they made it too hard to buy the product so what makes your customers so different? It’s just a little “food for thought” when you are viewing your sales funnels and cart abandonment rate and wondering why are customers dropping off at certain points in the online sales process. Check out the One Page checkout…
Luc
Developing Campaign Process Analysis as it relates to Web Analytics – Part 1
April 24, 2008
When it comes to setting up a campaign for your company’s online marketing initiative the ability to create, analyze and optimize is huge but it doesn’t happen overnight. You need to understand the following points in the process and at the end be willing to optimize based on the results of the campaign and when it comes to online marketing or advertising statistics and more importantly web analytics play a big role in understanding and giving insight into your customers and how they access your web presence and make a buying decision.
- Define your business’ objectives
- Define conversion events on your website
- Define key performance metrics to measure your success
- Collect data and assess about your campaign
- Optimize your campaign and repeat the process
Today I want talk about the first point “Define your business’ objectives”. It is important just like it is in any business to know where you are heading and setting goals to get there is an important practice in online business just as it is when running an offline business. Website analytics or “web analytics” means that you measure the metrics of your web site using a tool like Google Analytics to improve your company’s web presence. Setting realistic and attainable goals is a corner stone of the success of your web presence. So what do I mean when I say “Define your business’ objectives”? Have a look…
Define your business’ objectives - What is the goal of your business?
When I mean, “what is the goal of your business?” I am asking a specific question and it deserves a specific answer, something similar to this…
“To improve sales of our widgets by 15% next quarter”
Or
“To grow revenue from our online membership channel of our business by 300% over the next 18 months”
Or
“To continue to double search engine traffic from Google every month for the next 18 months”
When you define a business objective clearly it becomes easy for a web analyst to measure the success based on the goal or the outcome of an online marketing campaign. This is the first step in defining campaign process analysis and I will write the four follow-up articles on the coming weeks. Hope you enjoyed this one!
Luc
SEO Analytics - Tracking Search Engine Optimization
April 16, 2008
SEO Analytics is a term that has to first do with the optimization of a website so that search engines can “crawl” the web pages in the website making them “search engine friendly”. Tracking how people come to a website, understanding their behaviours and developing based off of factual results is the main idea behind Analytics.
If you put the two terms together then you get “SEO Analytics” which is the combination of optimizing a website for search engines using both on-page factors and off-page factors combined with reporting of how the optimization is affecting the customers, viewers or whoever makes up your audience that comes to view your website and in turn creating an intelligence about the efforts of SEO and the facts of Analytics.
So what are some ways to track SEO Analytics?
Internal Site Search (aka “Site Search”) – This can show you how your customers search your website once they are on, what they are looking for and how long they spend looking for it. If you’d like to have a look at what kind of metrics are tracked by Internal Site Searches in Google Analytics, feel free to write my article about this.
Referring Sites - Tracking where traffic is being referred from can help you develop new areas of inbound links to your website.
Comparing Natural (Organic) vs. Paid search – This provides you a benchmark to see how your Search Engine Optimization compares to that of your paid efforts.
Keyword Lists – This is helpful because the keywords are provided from search engines like Google or Yahoo! And show you the terms, queries and phrases people use in finding a page on your website.
All of these areas are covered when you install a tool like Google Analytics or Microsoft AdCenter Analytics to track visitors that are coming to your website. They can influence the design, layout and flow of the website and allow you to see opportunities for your business just so long as you are looking for them.
Luc
