Google’s Website Optmizer

So this is cool: Google just released yet another free tool, this one called the Website Optimizer. It’s built into Google AdWords (those “sponsored” links you see on the side of Google searches and on various websites). It focuses on the ability to do A/B ad testing, which simply means presenting a potential customer with one of a various number of different versions of a web page. This is usually a landing page (in most cases, if you are paying for people to click a link that just ends up on your main web page, you’re wasting money), whose goal is to convert a potential customer into an actual customer.

Thus ends marketing 101. Before using website optimizer, on my company’s site, we would manually create two versions of a landing page, and then tell Google to send half the people to one page, half to the other. We would then measure the amount of people who subscribed, and compare the two numbers. Not a bad way to do it, but a bit limited, and it also took a fair amount of time to setup each test.

Google’s website optimizer makes this much, much easier. You first setup a control – the basic version of your landing page, which you will run your other variations against. Then you define different sections for which you will test different layouts or content with, such as a header image, headline, content, etc.

So the neat thing is that instead of just doing a literally A/B test, where you have two versions of a page, you can give Google a few sections, and a few variations on those sections, and have 20, 30, 40, 50 different combinations which it will automatically test for you!

I can’t wait to start some of these tests and see what kind of numbers we get back.