Google's Website Optimizer – Multi Variate Testing for the Masses

Everyone who know what their conversion rate is wants to improve it. Improving user experience and website usability are great ways to improve your site's conversion rate, but how do you know if you have been successful or how successful you have been.

To properly assess what impact the changes you have made to your website you should be using an analytics package and performing A/B or multi variate testing. If you elect to perform A/B testing then it might take a long time to test all of the changes that you want to make as you can only test one element on a page at a time, not one version of the page vs. another version.

Goolge's website optimizer tool brings multi variate testing capabilities to the masses. Previously firms offering multi variate testing services charged fees that limited the use of their services to larger firms that could afford thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month to run tests. Now with Google's website optimizer smaller firms will be able to take advantage of optimization and testing tools that had been out of there reach before.

Now that was the good new. What companies need to be careful of is that they have the skills and expertise to successfully design and implement the test. From the implementation perspective Google has done a good job making this a reasonably simple process so that most if not all web masters should be able to implement a test once it has been designed. The catch comes with the design of your experiments. You must carefully select the landing page you want to test, which page should be considered the goal of the test, which elements or sections of the page should be tested, the selection of the variants for each section of the test,… are all extremely important decisions. Even the best testing system in the world won't delivery a significant improvement if the test isn't designed properly.

If you haven't started think about improving your conversion rates, your website's user experience and usability then you should. Some of the tools to help you get there are web analytics, multi variant testing, and working with experts in marketing, usability, and analytics to help you get there. So take advantage of your in-house talent in a new way, or seek outside help.