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Companies and conversions: Schuh increases conversions by 6% using Website Optimiser

Eddy — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:49:00 +0000

In this week's instalment of 'Companies and Conversions', we look at how Schuh tested their product pages using Website Optimiser to increase conversions (sales) by 6%.

Testing the product category layout

Schuh’s Web Developer, Patrick Timmons, wanted to increase the profitability of the Schuh website. With Website Optimiser, he knew he could run different versions of a single page and see what led to a better response (i.e. conversion rate) from visitors. He decided to concentrate his efforts on the product category pages of the site.

Looking at his original page design, there were a number of things Patrick could test. Would customers respond best to have more products to compare on the page? Or fewer products, but with bigger graphics and more detail? Would including a male model on each page appeal, or was it a waste of valuable page space? In order to stop guessing about website design and to learn more about their visitors' behaviour, Patrick decided to launch an A/B test with Website Optimiser.

Winning page increased 'add to baskets' by 10% After leaving the test to run just a couple of weeks in Website Optimiser, it became clear to Patrick that one variation was winning. Variation B improved ‘add to baskets’ by 10% in comparison to the original.

Assuming the new variation converts equally to the original layout, this results in a 6% overall improvement in site conversions for customers who navigate via the product category page.

What can you do next?

Identify areas of your site to test. This can be done by a simple usability analysis of your site, or by using hard data from your analytics programme. Design alternatives to the original and run the new variations via a testing platform such as Google’s free Website Optimiser.

Schuh are just one of the companies that have shared conversion improvement success stories with us. Read more about Schuh and others in the Conversion Centre. You can also learn more about our Google Conversion Professionals programme and how they could help you improve your site's profitability here.

Posted By Edward Jackson, Google Analytics Team

Auto-disabling – experimentation auto-pilot

Eddy — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:56:00 +0000

When you run an experiment with Website Optimiser, you're testing new content to see whether it improves your conversion rate. We can often find big winners, but, of course, some of our variations are going to be losers in that they perform significantly worse than our original content.

While you've been able to disable poor performing variations on your own for some time now, you needed to sign in, check your reports, and manually prune away the losers. No longer! Today, Website Optimiser adds a new feature: auto-disabling.

With auto-disabling, Website Optimiser will automatically prune poor performing variations for you. This keeps overall conversion rate high while testing. Additionally, by removing poor variations automatically, your traffic is focused on only the variations that have a chance at winning, which means experiments should complete faster. Lastly, we think auto-disabling gives you more freedom to try really big changes. If that crazy variation just doesn't work out, it'll be disabled. And if you've been anxious about running a test, you should be able to relax knowing that a losing variation won't hurt your overall conversion rate.

Auto-disabling is available for any Website Optimiser experiment with more than two variations (i.e. you can't use it for an A/B test, but you could for an A/B/C test). You can enable it from the experiment settings page. You can read more about setting up auto-disabling in this Help Center article.

Posted By Edward Jackson, Google Analytics Team

Website Optimiser advanced testing tricks

Eddy — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:18:00 +0000

Calling all Website Optimiser users! Do you get a kick out of setting up new tests, and waiting eagerly for the results? Or have you read our Techie Guide to Website Optimiser end to end and are hungry for more? Well then we have some excellent advanced resources in store for you.

Eric Vasilik, the lead Website Optimiser engineer based in the US, has put together a new GWO Tricks blog showcasing some of the advanced techniques which can be performed using Website Optimiser. These include:

Multiple goals: Setup tests where you can track multiple goals separately. For example you may want to track brochure downloads, separately from product sales within the same test.

Website Optimiser and Google Analytic s integration: Import Website Optimiser data into Google Analytics so you can reap the benefits of additional features such as segmenting experiment traffic against your GA data.
Fragmented Sections: Experiment with your site in such a way that you can fragment pieces of the page that you want to change, but allow you to have those pieces change together.

It's important to note that these are fairly advanced articles, so if you're just starting out with Website Optimiser, you may want to begin by looking at our Beginners Guide to Website Optimiser or the dedicated GWO Help Centre.

If you have tests that you've run with Website Optimiser, and would like to share, don't hesitate to contact us!

Posted By Edward Jackson, Google Analytics Team

Common myths about Google Analytics

Eddy — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:07:00 +0000

Our colleagues in the US recently posted an article clearing up a few myths that exist about Google Analytics. They have shared some really interesting insights into Google Analytics in this post so we thought we'd share it with our Conversion Room readers too.

Myth 1: "You get what you pay for." Google Analytics is free, which means the system is down a lot.

Google Analytics makes use of the same network of secure and reliable data centres used to power Google.com, making downtime an extremely rare occurrence. We have a large team focused exclusively on keeping your data safe and accessible, and benefit from multiple redundancies in our infrastructure around the globe (this makes us fast as well).

We even rely on Google Analytics for our own mission-critical products such as AdWords, which see huge volumes of traffic every day. If you're still having doubts, we'd encourage you to talk to some users and ask them how their experience has been with uptime.

Myth 2: Google Analytics is basic and doesn't have any "advanced" features or metrics

This one is a tough one to swallow! A more frequent complaint is actually that Google Analytics has too much data. The product includes over 90 standard reports with more than 125 metrics and dimensions covering everything from visits to internal site search queries.

Custom reports and user-defined variables allow you to create your own metrics and reports where the standard ones don't meet your needs.

With Pivoting, Advanced Segmentation, Secondary Dimensions, Event Tracking and the ability to share customisations, Google Analytics reports are more powerful than ever. Google Analytics may look "basic," on the surface, but it can do a lot more than you think!

More Info (Feature List, Custom Reports, Advanced Segmentation, Analytics API)

Myth 3: Google Analytics only supports third-party cookies

False! Google Analytics has always used first-party, not third-party cookies. First-party cookies are important because they allow Google Analytics to track repeat visitors, so you can see which keywor

d, referring site, etc. is responsible for bringing buyers even when it takes multiple visits for them to convert.

Myth 4: Google Analytics is not really accurate

If you've spent time doing web analytics work, you'll know the sinking feeling that

comes when two sets of numbers don't match. If you're experiencing a data discrepancy, don't panic. There are many others in the same boat.

Google Analytics uses JavaScript tags to collect data. This industry-standard method yields reliable trends and a high degree of precision, but it's not perfect. Most of the time, if you are noticing data discrepancies greater than 10%, it's due to an installation issue. Common problems include JavaScript errors, redirects, untagged pages and slow client-side load times.

For tips on how to sensibly approach data reconciliation, check out this post by Avinash Kaushik, Google's Analytics Evangelist, or this whitepaper on accuracy in Google Analytics.

All web analytics tools face the same technical limitations posed by JavaScript tags, so if another vendor claims their tool is more accurate, ask for some evidence.

More Info (Web Analytics Data Reconciliation Checklist, Whitepaper)

Myth 5: It's not possible to export your data from Google Analytics

Not true! You have two options for exporting data. Use the "export" button at the top of each report to export the current view in PDF or XML (up to 500 rows). Or, use the new Analytics Export API to extract large amounts of data in any format you like. Also, if you want to share data with a colleague, you can schedule reports to be delivered directly to their email inbox, or even send regular updates to your own email address.

More Info (How to Export your Data, Analytics API)

Myth 6: With Google Analytics you can't control your data

You have three options for data sharing in Google Analytics. You can change these options at any time from inside your Analytics account.do not share your data

share your data with Google to improve its products
share your data anonymously for benchmarking

No matter which option you choose, your data is protected by several layers of defense:

Dedicated security and infrastructure teams
Multiple redundancies to prevent data loss
Network redundancies to keep data accessible
Advanced security, firewalling and routing to keep data secure
Restricted access and principle of least privilege for personnel

If you opt-out of data sharing, your data will remain within Google Analytics and will not be shared with other products or services. If you decide to share your data with Google, it will be used to improve those products and services. Lastly, if you decide to share your data anonymously with others, it will be blended with other data to support the Google Analytics benchmarking feature. For more information on these options and what they mean, refer to the Google Analytics data sharing FAQ.

If you're still concerned, Google also offers a software product called Urchin (www.urchin.com) that you can run locally.

More Info (Data Sharing FAQ, Google Privacy Policy)

Myth 7: Google Analytics does not support A/B or multivariate testing and isn't well-integrated with other tools

Google offers a full range of marketing products including a free testing tool called Google Website Optimiser. You can use it to test different page elements and find out which ones yield the highest conversion rate and ROI. You can also use Google Analytics in conjunction with Website Optimiser to create an optimisation plan for your site.

Google Analytics is also integrated with many of Google's other business products including AdWords, AdSense, and AdPlanner. It is also widely supported by third party tools ranging from content management systems, to email suites, to call center applications. In addition, you'll find many products that are complementary to Google Analytics including DoubleClick, TVAds, Webmaster Tools, GooglwTrends, Insights for Search, Feedburner, and more.

More Info (Google Website Optimiser, GWO Blog)

Myth 8: You can't segment data in Google Analytics

In October 2008, Google Analytics released three new Enterprise Features: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports and Motion Charts. Advanced Segmentation lets you segment visits by dozens of metrics and dimensions such as geographic location, time on site, referral site and much much more. You can create segments on the fly and apply them to virtually all the standard reports in Google Analytics as well as custom reports.

Myth 9: You have to spend a lot of money to get "real" web analytics

Getting a return from your Analytics data does take an investment. The most important investment to start with is making sure you or someone at your organisation has the expertise and time to put your data to use. If at that point you still feel you need to pay more for a more complicated tool, that's OK, but remember that every dollar you spend on a tool takes away from money you could be spending on actually getting results, i.e. hiring or contracting a talented analyst (see the 90/10 Rule).

The question sometimes comes up, "if Google Analytics is free, what's in it for Google?" Google benefits from Google Analytics in two ways. First, if webmasters build better sites, it helps us connect searchers with the information they need faster. Second, if advertisers use Google Analytics, they are able to see their advertising ROI, which helps us demonstrate the value of Google AdWords. Both aspects have helped create a strong business case for Google Analytics over the years.

Google Analytics is getting more powerful with each new update, and you may be surprised by what it can do! You can find out more by signing up for Google Analytics webinar's here.

More info (90/10 Rule)

Our next post will cover part 3 of our series focusing on Google Analytics features and we'll look at Motion Charts.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

Introducing the Beginners Guide to Google Website Optimiser

Eddy — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:32:00 +0000

Do you want to start improving your website performance using Website Optimiser, but just don't know where to begin? If so we've got the resource for you.

We have just released The Beginners Guide to Website Optimiser. This guide takes you through every step of setup, from pre-test planning right through to interpreting test results.

Some of the cool things you'll find the in the Beginners Guide include:

Planning your first experiment
Ideas for identifying what content to test
Step by step installation guide
Interpreting your report

You can access the beginners guide in the following languages: UK , DE , FR , IT , ES , NL

For more advanced users...

If you are a developer/advanced user of Website Optimiser, you may be also interested in The Techie Guide to Website Optimiser. This guide covers just about everything you wanted to know about the technical ins and outs of Website Optimiser.

Some of the cool things you'll find in the Techie Guide include:

A detailed explanation of the Website Optimiser experiment scripts
How to implement segmentation in your experiments
How to test with dynamic content

You can download the Techie Guide for free at google.com/websiteoptimizer/techieguide (PDF).

Posted By Edward Jackson, Google Website Optimiser Team

Website Optimiser – Identifying high value pages to test

Eddy — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:30:00 +0000

In my last post, I introduced Google Website Optimiser. This free testing platform allows you to run variations of your existing web pages and track what content produces the most sales and leads on your site. Tweaking web content influences customer behaviour, and can bring you big conversion wins. In preparation for creating variations of your current content, it's worth deciding which pages are highest priority to test. Here are ideas for how

to do this, with practical examples of Google Analytics

reports which will help you.

High Traffic Landing Pages

From my experience with AdWords, I would often see advertisers build out well structured ad campaigns and then make the simple mistake of linking the ad's destination URL to the home page of their site, rather than a specific product page related to their ad. More often than not, this would lead to a high bounce rate and clicks that would not result in sales or leads. In general, website visitors only spend a few seconds scanning the page they reach after they've clicked on an ad. If the product or service they're looking for isn't immediately visible, they will leave.

So what's the lesson here (apart from ensuring that you direct your ads to the most relevant pages of your site)? Answer: landing pages are high value, high importance pages for your advertising. A landing page is your visitors' first (and all too often, last) impression of your website. As landing pages normally receive high traffic levels, they impact strongly on whether users pursue their shopping / information goals on your site.

For all these reasons, landing pages present a great opportunity for web optimisation. If you can make your landing pages clearer and more compelling, more visitors will stay on your site and go on to buy / enquire with you. The traffic you're working hard to drive to your site will be more likely to convert, meaning more profit for your business (at no extra cost).

You can identify your highest traffic landing pages easily using Google Analytics. To do so, click on the 'Top Landing Pages' (see image below) report within the Content section of your account. This report will enable you to identify high traffic landing pages which also have a high bounce rate and thus are ripe for optimisation.

The Google Analytics 'Top Landing Pages report' (Content Section) shows a list of top landing pages ordered by the amount of traffic on the left. On the right hand side of the report, you can view the Bounce Rate of the landing pages compared to site average. To view this report, select the 'compare to graph' option on the right hand side and select the drop down for bounce rate. Pages with a high amount of visitors and a high bounce rate (red bar), are good candidates for optimization.

Funnel pages

Other high value pages to test are those contained within a path leading to a funnel conversion goal. A 'funnel' is a series of pages through which a visitor must pass before reaching the conversion goal. The purpose of tracking these pages is to see how efficiently your pages direct visitors to your goal. If you identify any pages within a funnel which have a high drop off rate, then these should be seen as a priority to optimise, as they are restricting the amount of users reaching the conversion goal.

For example, let's say you want users on your company's site to submit an application form. Each step leading up to application submission is a step in the conversion funnel, with the 'Thank you for submitting' page as the final goal page. You'd like to improve conversions and you're wondering about your site content. Could the application form contain too many fields for customers to fill in, or could the information required from customers be difficult for them to locate? Factors like this could deter visitors from completing your form. But what if you could identify which page of your conversion funnel had the highest bounce / drop off rate? You would then know that this was a great page to make changes to and test in order to increase the number of conversions on the site.

In Google Analytics, you can specify up to ten pages in a defined funnel and these represent the path that you expect visitors to take on their way to the goal page. Once you have created a funnel within Google Analytics, you can view the 'Funnel Visualisation' report located in the Goals section of your account. This report shows you how many visitors exit the funnel at each step in the path towards the goal page.

In the funnel visualisation below, we've taken another example: a retailer who wants visitors to their site to buy from them. You can see that most visitors in this funnel are lost in the final transition from the 'View Shopping Cart' step to the 'Completed Order'. Only 2% of visitors move past this step to actually complete an order, so this would be an ideal page to start testing in order to greatly improve results.

The Google Analytics Funnel Visualisation report (Goals Section) shows the pages where visitors drop out of the funnel path. Pages that lose a high percentage of traffic on the path towards a website goal are good candidates for optimization.

That's all for now on choosing pages to test using Website Optimiser. I hope you find these principles useful as you drive conversion success through website optimisation.

Posted By Edward Jackson, Google Website Optimizer Team

Website Optimiser – Test and enhance your website

Eddy — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:37:00 +0000

Over the last few weeks, we have discussed techniques for monitoring your website's performance using Google Analytics. With the reporting Analytics provides, you may havenoticed areas you'd like to work on. For example, if your homepage has a very high bounce rate, or people are leaving your sales / enquiry form pages too early, how do you fix this in order to turn more visitors into paying customers? Website Optimiser gives you the opportunity to test variations of your current web pages to see what content works best on your site.

What is Website Optimiser?

So what is it? Website Optimiser is a free testing platform and optimisation tool which allows you to run different variations of your site’s content simultaneously. Your incoming traffic is automatically split so that each variation of a web page you want to test is exposed to equal proportions of your visitors. Website Optimiser then tracks which variation is most successful in generating conversions for you, i.e. sales, leads, or any other action you deem valuable. Using Website Optimiser to test and improve your site content, you can dramatically increase revenue and ROI, and it doesn't cost a penny.

For example, let's say you feel there's room for improvement on your landing page. You've noticed it has a high bounce rate, but you're not quite sure how to fix this. Is there too much text on the page? Should you make the call to action button bigger? Should you add / remove imagery or links? You go ahead and create a new 'improved' page variation. Instead of taking a leap in the dark and trying to guess whether the new page performs better than the old page, you can use Website Optimiser to find out. Once the test has been launched, Website Optimiser will divide your traffic between the two pages and will then advise you via detailed reporting as to which page drives more leads/sales.

Why should I start using Google Website Optimiser?

1. Increase conversions: It's not uncommon when optimising key web pages for a few small changes to double, or even triple, conversion rates. You put a lot of time and effort into driving traffic to your site. Why risking losing visitors you've worked so hard to bring on board? Tweaking and testing web content could increase your site's conversion rate so that you're getting a higher return on investment from the same volume of visitors.

2. Eliminate guesswork from site design: Why base design decisions on assumptions? Instead of trying to guess what button converts best, or which headline is the most compelling, let Website Optimiser take the guesswork out of site design, by leveraging empirical data from real visitors.

3. Improve landing pages: Reduce the number of would-be customers you lose through ineffective landing pages. Website Optimiser's automated testing makes it easy to fix and deploy compelling web pages.

4. It's really easy to use: You don't have to be a statistical genius to use the tool. Providing you have the new page variations ready, you can set up tests in under 10 minutes.

Still not convinced? See what our advertisers have to say about Website Optimiser.

Where do I begin?

Visit Google.com/WebsiteOptimiser to sign up for your free Website Optimiser account and further details on testing best practices.

Posted by Edward Jackson, Website Optimiser Team