Last week Google made one of the most awesome upgrades to Google Website Optimizer! If you’ve used GWO much at all, you’ll agree that this upgrade will make your life much easier. I’ve outlined the primary changes below. If you want to read more about the upgrade directly from Google, visit the Official Google Website Optimizer Blog site.

There are 3 major changes in the upgrade that have me jumping up and down with joy:

1. You can now validate an A/B experiment by uploading a local file (this was needed badly), enough said;
2. You can disable a combination in an active experiment; and
3. Better color representation of a combination’s performance confidence.

The image in Figure 1 below is from the new GWO report. Click on the image to view a larger version. The biggest thing to note about the changes is that now you can disable a variation that is performing badly and concentrate on the variations that are doing very well. Just click on the checkbox (item 1) then on the disable button (item 2). This option will allow GWO to produce more definitive results much quicker and without having to stop, copy, and re-start the experiment. That is so awesome that I’m almost plum giddy!

The final major improvement to the report is the color representation of how well a combination is performing (item 3). Although Combination 2 is performing much better than 1 or the original, the graph will not turn green until it is truly a high confidence winner.

Go ahead and give it a try for yourself!

No matter what kind of website you have, there may come a time when you ask yourself “Is my website giving my company any value?” This value doesn’t always have to be money, for instance a contact page can generates great value. Assigning value to leads can be difficult to estimate and track, but this process needs to be done to accurately portray the entire economic benefit of your site. Three basic steps should be taken to make sure you’re on the correct path to answering the question about perceived value.

The first step to tracking value on your site is by using a tracking software.

Google Analytics is a great program which gives detail statistics in an easy to understand layout. Plus, it’s free and who doesn’t like free? Once tracking software is added, people think they don’t have to do anything else, which is far from the true. People will “oh and ah” over the cool functionality of the program and think they are tracking the value of the website. Data on visitor’s location, time spent on site and browser version—doesn’t give any value if you’re not tracking what I like to call your “call to action” steps or button. Your “call to action” is the click, or clicks you want your visitors to hit, which will meet your website’s goal and value.

This brings me to the second step which is to set up goals and/or “Call to Actions.”

Google Analytics gives the option to set up four different goals. Here’s a short list of examples of typical goals:

• Dealer Locator Page
• Contact Page
• Email Subscription
• E-Commerce
• Tracking Order of Page Visits

After reading the second bullet point, you may be asking, “Why do I need to set up a goal for a contact page?” I already have the contact emails which I can count to track the process. Although, did they come from paid search, or a referral site? You could always ask every single customer who emails you, “How did you find my site and what pages did you visit?” In this case and many others, you will be missing a large amount of data. Plus, there’s no reason to waste your breath or fingers on something that can be automated.

The third step is to sit back and wait for the data.

It’s just about impossible to make marketing decisions without a goal-oriented website. I know firsthand, because I’ve dealt with many sites, some were even e-Commerce sites, that didn’t have any goals setup. The data was there but it was not being used to it’s fullest extent.

Don’t let your website be caught without goals! If you have any questions about what your website goals should be, ask one of us here at Beacon by posting a comment.

…or are they just another vendor trying to get as much of your IT and Marketing budget as possible?

(more…)

The number one question that seems to be asked is “What should I test on my site”. Ultimately, that depends on the type of site you have (i.e. eCommerce, brochure, etc.) and the goals of your site. When I’m analyzing a site for website optimization strategies, the first thing that I ask is “What is the primary goal of the site?” (i.e. lead generation, purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, etc.) I believe that this is the most important question to know the answer to because it dictates all subsequent actions that you should take. Let’s look at one example answer to this question and how it affects the testing that should be done: “I want to generate qualified leads that I can use in email marketing campaigns.” From this statement, you can deduce that the best place to generate these leads is through some type of sign-up form.

A Sample Contact Form Analysis

Let’s assume that Google Analytics (GA) is already installed on the site. Let’s also assume that a “Contact Form” goal has been established. The image on the right is a sample funnel visualization for the contact form. Click on the image to enlarge it and see the detail. Notice that 201 visitors landed on the contact page and only 13% completed the first step in the funnel and moved on to the contact us form. This generally means that you have lost 77% of the potential new leads. Scary isn’t it? Now notice that of the 13% that completed the first step, only 40% actually completed the form. Overall, only 7.9% of all visitors that entered the funnel actually completed it. Now what?

Since 77% of visitors are abandoning the funnel from the Contact Page, that’s the first place to look to perform testing. The image below shows our fictitious contact page. Notice that the contact page also includes a phone number and mailing address. It’s very difficult (if not impossible) to identify how many of the 174 visitors that didn’t continue into the funnel actually called or send a snail mail in lieu of filling out the form. Or if any of them contacted the company at all.

There are many tests that could be performed on this page such as moving the form here with and without the phone numbers and addresses below the form; putting the form on this page and providing a link to the additional information, especially if the primary goal is to get visitors to fill out the form; or this page could contain 2 links, one to the contact form and the other to the additional information.

Use your imagination and see how many variations you can come up with. Share them here as an online exercise. Happy Testing!

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you changed a button on your site? Would your users respond well or just abandon you forever? Ever wanted to put your showcase image on the right side of your form instead of the left, but were afraid to because your users already have an expectation for your site? What about changing your contact form? But…what’s the right combination to get more people to fill it out?

Well, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) lets you try all that and more without making permanent changes to your site until you’re sure which one is the best!

I love GWO! It’s like playing in the sandbox when I was a kid. I built some castles with two towers and others with three. Sometimes I made makeshift flags built out of leaves. Sometimes I would use pebbles for windows or to create a stone cap for the towers. Would I have had more fun with two castles at the same time? What if I had built three castles each with different attributes like short towers, tall towers, round towers, rectangular windows, square windows, round windows or even arched doors! Wouldn’t that have been great? When I was a kid, I was only interested in one castle at a time. Now that I’m older and see all the possibilities out there, I want tons of castles.

What history shows us

I think that the history of website design has followed a similar path from its infancy to a now more mature and robust capability of what we can do with a website. Do you remember when everything on the web had frames with the navigation on the left side in its own frame? Wow! How things have changed. Now, everyone wants all the castles they can fit into their site. However, it’s increasingly important to discover what motivates your visitors, not just your market segment, and not just what looks good.

GWO lets you try out different scenarios and measures which variation has the best performance in getting your users to do what you want them to such as filling out a form, adding a product to your shopping cart, or registering for an account on your site. Let’s take a look at a sample case study for an e-commerce site that changes out a button. Take a look at the seven buttons below. Can you guess which one caused more people to click on it?

Amazingly enough, the large red button has out-performed all the others. I chose to use the red one just to be a little silly, while maintaining a professional look and feel. I had no idea that it would perform so well!

Since we used GWO, we have the proof!

For a total of 4521 visitors during the experiment period, the Red Large button was displayed to 645 people and 50.1% of them performed the action that we wanted. It is still showing an observed improvement of 3.88% while all other buttons are dropping in effectiveness.

The Moral

So, the moral of this story is to get back in your sandbox! Build as many castles as you want with as many variations as you can come up with! There is no limit to the number of tests you can do. There is no limit to the designs and layouts that you can try. One of the best parts about it is the tool is already out there to compile your data and prove to yourself, your designer, or your boss which one is really the most effective in persuading your visitors to take the plunge.

This is my first post on the Beacon Blog and because I will be posting for the Google Analytics Category I thought there probably isn’t a much better way than to start out with the top 10 reasons why I think you should give Google Analytics a serious consideration. Over the next period I will probably write post that go into more detail about these individual areas but here is a high level overview of what I think are the 10 most convincing reasons to give Google Analytics a try.

1. It’s Free: Google Analytics a very comprehensive website analytics package that provides a clean, user friendly design interface. The charts are very easy to understand and make data collection and analysis much easier. Providing business owners and clients with meaningful information is a necessary business function but when Google takes on a task, improves it, and makes it free to everyone, how can you not give it a try?

2.Reporting Interface: The way the metrics are displayed provide a very easy to understand format, namely charts and graphs with several view options for every report. Even if you have absolutely no statistical or analytical background, you can easily understand the good and bad and measure performance improvements or losses due to the data or site comparison chart options. Google Analytics also shows the good numbers in Green and the bad (negative) numbers in red.

3.Imports Adwords Cost Data: If you have ecommerce turned on and apply your cost data, you can view your cost and revenue associated with every Adwords campaign, Ad group, and all the way down to the keyword level. This makes ROI analysis much easier than constantly having to go back and forth between Adwords and a web analytics program. You can sort your groupings by goal or Ecommerce conversion rates, or even the provided ROI field and focus on the strong performers or remove the weak ones. The ROI field does not take into consideration the cost of goods sold, so you may need to export to excel, add the new field and recalculate to get a truer form of your ROI but nonetheless, this would be much more difficult if you had to collect the data from several sources.

4.Customizable: There are many options that you can easily control by adjusting the Google Analytics tracking code embedded on pages you’re tracking. You can control the session timeout, campaign timeout, set keywords to ignore, add organic sources, set custom campaign fields, and much more. For other options you can’t control with the GA tracking code, you can easily manipulate through the control of filters. Filters allow you to include/exclude based on dozens of options giving you the ability to provide profiles as specific as you need. The GA tracking script out of the box provides most businesses with what they need but if you have special tracking requirements, you there are several ways to customize the tracking code to allow you a completely custom tracking solution.

5.Event Tracking: The recently released Event Tracking feature provides a new level of flexibility in website analytics. Gone are the days of not being able to track on page activities without skewing your pageviews. Event tracking allows for tracking actions associated with flash objects, dynamic rotating content, movie players, interactive buttons, complex forms, and much more. You can build custom tracking solutions for almost any type of activity on a site and associate site usage, Ecommerce, or goal conversion data with those activities providing a whole new level of traffic and visitor usage data analysis.

6.Support: There is a wide array of support options available from reading one of the Google help forums, reading one of the many books available, engaging in one of the several Webinars, or consulting with a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC) to help you setup a custom solution, interpret and understand meaningful data, or to provide ongoing consultative support. Because of the nature of it being free, there is such a large community of users so that you are not likely to be the first to encounter an issue and chances are high there is already some great information available online to help you.

7.Site Search: One of Google’s newer features is the ability to track your internal site search. This is a great tool for understanding what visitors are trying to find on your site. As with most of the reports in Google Analytics, you can associate goal and ecommerce data by selecting one of the several reporting views. This provides you with an incredible source of keywords that you know your site’s ability to convert for your organic campaigns, PPC campaigns, or other targeted marketing campaigns. This feature also allows you to adjust your internal navigation to place items, articles, or objects that your visitors are trying to access closer to high view areas of your site ultimately creating a more user friendly website that will make conversion a little easier for your visitors.

8.Segmentation: This feature is critical to understanding your website’s user behaviors. Most websites have a target audience but within that target audience, there are often several sets of users with different behaviors and being able to identify these additional sets and isolate their behaviors is the first step in truly understanding your target audience. From there, you can take it in several directions to provide a much better user experience which will lead to higher conversion rates, better branding, higher volumes of repeat traffic, more page views, and a stronger web presence. There are several ways to segment traffic but the easiest is with the user-defined segmentation Google Analytics provides almost out of the box. There are some additional snippets of code that have to be embedded and you can setup filters to isolate these segmentations once triggered providing you with detailed unique website stats for these variations in your users. As you can imagine, this provides you with the ability to measure testing and marketing success at a very detailed level.

9.Competition is doing it. Google Analytics is the most widely used website analytics package available and is providing high level of insights to your competition. If you aren’t using a detailed analytics package such as Google Analytics with a resource allocated towards analyzing it and taking action, you are handicapping your company’s web capabilities and might as well start handing over market share.

10.Benchmarking: No other website analytics package can provide as much insight as the beta benchmarking feature will provide. This feature allows you to compare key performance indicators with like businesses in similar industries so you can benchmark your success against your competitors. This new feature builds value as more people sign up for it because your ability to specify your industry will become much more in accurate. You can see your traffic, bounce rates, pageviews, and other great metrics in relation to competitors to determine your weak or strong areas and can build website optimizer testing to strengthen you site’s presence on the web.

I know my list is not comprehensive and probably leaves additional questions but that is what some of the future posts are going to be dedicated towards. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here and I will get back to you as soon as possible.