A Beginner's Guide to Google Website Optimizer - Part 1

A Beginner's Guide to Google Website Optimizer (Part 1)
By Kalena Jordan (c) 2008

We all know that the most effective Pay Per Click advertising campaigns use landing pages that are matched perfectly to your target search keywords and designed to follow through with the idea or theme that your PPC ad has hinted at.

But how do you determine the effectiveness of those landing pages? How do you know what design or page features will trigger a better response in your audience and lead to more conversions? The answer is that you don't, unless you test.

Benefits of Landing Page Testing

Whether they are a part of a PPC campaign or not, there are countless benefits to testing your web site pages, including:

• Improve the effectiveness of landing pages
• Increase conversions / sales
• Attract more leads / sign-ups
• Increase time spent on your site by visitors
• Reduce the Cost Per Acquisition of new customers
• Eliminate guesswork. Improve your site design via information from your site's end users
• Avoid staff disputes – let your customers decide what design elements should be changed

Google Website Optimizer

The Website Optimizer is a tool that allows marketers and webmasters to test variations of pages on site visitors automatically, to see which pages or variations of pages perform the best (i.e. lead to the most conversions).

In April 2007, Google took their Website Optimizer tool out of BETA and made it available to the general public. I had been wanting to use Google Website Optimizer to test our landing pages on Search Engine College for some time and I finally found the time to trial it in October this year. After what we learned from our experiments, I wish we'd implemented it months ago!

Website Optimizer helps you study the effects of different content on your users and identify what users respond to best so you can alter your web site accordingly. You can test any kind of site elements from individual copy blocks and images to complete page layouts. Perhaps the best thing about Website Optimizer is that you can test ANY page on your site, including landing pages you have designed for other PPC programs like Yahoo or pages designed for non-PPC purposes.

Google Website Optimizer allows you to perform 2 different types of tests:

1) A/B Split Testing
2) Multivariate Testing

You can view a 5 min overview of Website Optimizer here.

A/B Split Testing:

Through the use of code added to the "A" (original) page, Google is able to serve the A/B variations (there can be many more variations than just the "B" page) to site visitors and then provide results of which page was most "successful", commonly through reporting which of the A/B pages lead traffic to a "results" page.

A/B Testing compares the performance of entirely different versions of a page. Google suggests using it if:

> your page traffic is fairly low (i.e. less than 1,000 page views per week)

> you want to move sections around or change the overall look of the page

In Figure 1, you can see an A/B Testing experiment being set up in Website Optimizer.

Figure 1 – Website Optimizer A/B Experiment Set-Up

Setting Up A/B Experiments in Website Optimizer

To set up an A/B testing experiment in Google Website Optimizer, you first need to prepare three things:

1) Your "original" web page
2) Your variation/s of this original
3) Your conversion page (e.g. the "thank you for subscribing/purchasing" page)

In the example you see in Figure 1, we set up an experiment on SearchEngineCollege.com consisting of our original page (/add-me.shtml) and a single variation (/add-me.shtml), with our conversion page being /seo-starter-course-sample-download.shtml.

Next, you need to add some javascript to each of these pages to enable Google to track your experiment. Then it's simply a matter of uploading all your test pages and having Google validate your URLs to confirm you've set up your experiment correctly.

Multivariate Testing:

Testing can be made not only with A/B pages, but with different possible versions of a single page.

This allows you to trial different types of layouts and page text to see which combinations lead to the highest conversions on your site.

Multivariate Testing compares the performance of content variations in multiple locations on a page. Google suggests using it if:

> your page traffic is high (i.e. more than 1,000 page views per week)

> you want to try multiple content changes in different parts of the page simultaneously

Setting Up Multivariate Experiments in Website Optimizer

To set up a Multivariate testing experiment in Google Website Optimizer, you need to do the following:

1) Choose the web page you wish to test.

2) Decide with your marketing/technical teams which page sections you wish to test e.g. headline, image, call-to-action, copy etc.

Figure 2 – Website Optimizer Multivariate Experiment Set-Up

3) Add the JavaScript code to your page's source code. This includes the Control Script, the Tracking Script and the Page Section Script.

4) Identify your conversion page and add the Conversion Script to that page's source code.

5) Upload your revised test and conversion pages.

6) Validate your pages. If you've set up your experiment correctly, you will see a confirmation message.

7) Create the code variations for each page section you are testing (see Figure 3).

8) Review and launch your experiment.

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Link Bait: Attracting Links To Your Website

Link Bait: Attracting Links To Your Website
By Trey Pennewell (c) 2008

You know it is funny in a way. Webmasters have learned that the most important thing that they can do to improve the traffic to their website and to attract attention from the search engines is to build links to their website.

But when it comes time to actually start building links to one's website, people typically pick the hardest way to accomplish the task and then they get to work.

Working Hard

People have been told about various ways to build links to one's website, and they go through the process of picking out the method that they would prefer to use. It is kind of ironic that most people pick the method that they believe will be the easiest and least expensive to achieve, and when all is said and done, they will have picked out the hardest, least effective method of building links.

For example, most newcomers to online business choose:

• Reciprocal links;
• Directory submissions.

With Reciprocal Links, people buy a software package that helps them to search out websites that are supposedly "related" to theirs and then they send an email to the person who owns that website, proclaiming the benefits of trading links and asking for the link.

With directory submissions, webmasters can get software that is supposed to help with the process, but it takes hours just to submit one's website to a few dozen directories. Fortunately, there are service providers who also provide submissions to web directories. Regardless of how you get links submitted to web directories, you generally have to pray that those web directories are approving submissions, since most owners have abandoned their directories.

Beyond the time required setting up links in this fashion, and the frustration of getting very few links for the amount of time spent, the worst part of the equation is that the search engines tend to ignore links gained through these methods, and few humans find and follow those links.

Internet newcomers using these methods frequently spend a lot of time trying to promote their websites, and in the end, they have accomplished nothing more than wasting a lot of their time and energy.

Working Smart

What if I could show you a better way? Would you be intrigued enough by my methods to try them for yourself?

My point in sharing this with you is not to annoy you, but to help you get better results in much less time.

When we launch new websites, we ignore reciprocal links and web directories altogether. We consider both to be a complete waste of time, effort and money.

Let me put this into perspective for you by giving you a real life example.

On November 18th, 2008, we bought and built a new niche domain: http://www.shoppingtraveldeals.com/blog/

Today is December 27th, so this site has only been active for just under six weeks.

We purchased the domain on the 18th, had it set up with content on the 19th, and then on the 20th, we started promoting this website. We released our first and second reprint articles, promoting this site on the 20th of November. We released our third article on the 24th and the fourth on the 25th. Then we released our fifth article promoting the website on December 15th.

We also set up bookmarks for the main page of the website in Stumbleupon, Digg and Propeller.

In the 39 days since we bought this domain, our website has seen 520 unique visitors. The site had 86 visitors in November and 434 so far in December.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

We got traffic from 66 unique web pages, and we drew click-through traffic from Google and Windows Live, with 86% of our search traffic coming from Google.

On our search engine traffic, we have traffic on 171 unique keyword phrases. In order to better understand this search engine traffic, we ran the top 25 search terms through Google to see where our website ranked in the search results, and this is what we came up with:

• Two #1 listings;
• Ten listings that were ranked from #2 to #4;
• Ten listings that were ranked from #5 to #10;
• Two listings on page two of Google's search results (#11 to #20);
• One listing on page three of Google's results (#21 to #30).

We built this website with the express intent of earning affiliate commissions in the travel industry. The prognosis is good, as we have already started earning money from this website, and in terms of our current earnings, we expect to be in the black against our initial investment into this website, within about three months.

More About Reprint Articles

The concept of the reprint article is to write an article and give it to other webmasters to use in their websites and newsletters, in exchange for a link back to your website.

Those articles that seek to teach something of value typically get published more frequently than those articles geared to sell a product or service. It is our fervent belief that the Author's resource box - the paragraph that follows the article - is the only place where a writer should try to sell his or her wares. The goal of the resource box is to get a reader to your website, and your website is where the real selling should take place.

Reprint articles provide good value to the people who use them wisely. But the online marketer must first be willing to invest the required time or money to have appropriate articles written and/or distributed.

While it is true that I work for an article distribution company, it is important to note that our guiding principle is that each article distribution company will reach a different and unique audience. As such, we always use our own service to distribute articles and occasionally we use our competitors' article distribution companies as well.

We distribute ALL of our own articles through our own company, because we know that our service does provide real value. But for some articles, we do go to some of our competitors to expand our reach and to reach new audiences.

We actually learned to do this from some of our more successful customers, who suggest that there are certain publishers that only we can reach, while our competitors also have certain publishers that only they are able to reach. As a result, many of our customers use two or three article distribution companies, and we do too.

Working Smarter

While reprint articles is a tool that we consistently utilize to build links and to grow traffic to our websites, there remains a more long-term, yet more valuable approach to building links for our websites.

Link Bait is an idea where you create a resource that people find so useful that they feel compelled to link to it from their own websites.

Look at it this way. With reprint articles, we have to write the article, and then distribute it through the sources we choose to use to get it into circulation. All told, we will invest several hours into writing, and then we will invest another hour to distribute the article.

All told, we will have spent four to five hours to write and distribute this article. In turn, we will receive dozens or hundreds of links from related web pages (the links are from "related web pages", because we designed the article content to look like what we are trying to promote). Writing and distributing articles typically creates a great return of value for our businesses.

But consider this. Last week, we created a resource page on one of our websites. This page is an enumeration of the +1200 article directories we know to exist on the Internet. We were not the first website to provide such a list, but we may be the first to give the Internet community an easy method to add new sites and to flag bad sites, automatically from the page where the sites are displayed.

If you are able to create a page such as this that people find extremely useful, then people are more inclined to link to your page, without you even asking them to do so. The beauty about building pages like this on the Internet is that all you have to do is to let people know it is there, and then the links will roll in steadily.

One Link Bait page we built on May 1st, 2004 has been used by the public more than 38,000 times according to its built-in counter. And according to a Yahoo search, it has more than 10,000 inbound links from third-party websites.

We built this page in a day, wrote one article to let people know it was there, and then we left the page alone for more than four-and-a-half years.

Do you see how it is much easier to build one link bait, notify the world, and then to let people link to your web page for you? The time invested in our Text To Hyperlink Converter was less than 12 hours, yet it has attracted +10,000 links with almost no promotion on our part. And this article will generate +100 links in exchange for five hours of our time.

In Conclusion

We are working smart when we write and distribute articles to promote a website. The Shopping Travel Deals site attests to the value of reprint articles to build links and traffic to a new website quickly.

But we are working smarter, when we invest the additional time to build a link bait web page that people will appreciate and link to for us, without any additional effort on our part.

About The Author
Trey Pennewell is part of thephantomwriters.com support staff. In the quest to bring more effective Internet promotion tools to their customers, The Phantom Writers is proud to announce this week that in conjunction with professional video editors and voice-over personalities, they now provide professional Video Creation Services. It has been made possible for online marketers to easily convert their promotional articles to Video Articles. Explore the unlimited possibilities of Video Marketing at: thephantomwriters.com/video-article-marketing.html