Above is an example of a report from Google website optimizer. The goal of this part of my campaign was to optimize a landing page to encourage people click on a button leading them to second page encouraging visitors to download some information.
Website optimizer allows you to create multiple pages, the system will alternate the pages and report back how each page performed against the other(s). As you can see from the data above my test page did 37% better than the original page. That was significant enough for me to replace the original page with my challenging page.
As tempting as it is to make judgements early in the process make sure your pages have at least 100 total visitors before you come to any conclusions or stop the campaign.
The next step in the process is to test another page to see if I can make additional improvements. First, I will let the winner run a while. If you immediately challenge the winning page you may lose out on opportunities, especially if your new challenge page does poorly. Give each campaign time to breath.
Once you have established a winning page, don’t make major changes moving forward. One adjustment is best. The reason is if you make multiple adjustments to the challenge page you will not know which of the changes helped or hurt the new page.
Ultimately, the above campaign had three pages in the sales funnel. A landing page, email/download page and a thank you page. Both the landing page and download page needed to be optimized to improve conversions. The landing page ,at the time of this writing, has a 32.1% conversion rate and the email page has a 32% conversion rate. This means about 10 out of every 100 people who visit the landing page move through the sales funnel by clicking the right button, entering their email and download the information.
If your landing page receives 100 visitors a month minor tweaks once in a while are OK. If your site receives 10,000 or more a month additional tweaks can represent a lot of money. Even a .05 percent improvement can make a big income difference on high traffic websites.
Optimizer is not hard to use, but you do need to understand how to insert a little code into your webpages.
When should you use optimizer? When you are trying to decide on an important page for your website, optimizer is often helpful. I recommend you use website optimizer every time you use landing pages for email or internet advertising. And you should always use landing pages for these campaigns.
Rosh