Mojot Blog

All marketers know or at least should know who their visitors are and what they are looking for on a website. However, no one is the visitor’s mind to be able to say with 100% certainty that the website it completely tailored to the visitors needs. Although visitor profiling is is necessary for every website, still visitors can show unusual behavior patterns that need to be tracked and applied to the website design and content.

This can be a real challenge. However, there are several tools that allow us to do that such as Google Website Optimizer, Adobe Omniture, Visual Website Optimizer and Unbounce.

However, the free and most used one is of course Google’s Website Optimizer.

The testing is done in 3 phases:

1. Choose the pages and content to test
2. Test variations with your visitors
3. Analyze what changes drive most conversions

Choose the pages and content to test

When testing your landing pages you must set a goal for the testing. You must know what you are testing. Most important is that you do not make too different page variations. The reason for this is that you won’t know which changes actually triggered the increase/decrease in conversion rate. Thus, make several pages with small variations so you can be certain what the change trigger is. Sometimes a call-to-action button color change can show drastic results.

Create and publish different versions of your test page at unique URLs so that Website Optimizer can randomly display different versions to your users.

Next, you need to identify your conversion page. This is an existing page on your website that users reach after they’ve completed a successful conversion. For example, this might be the page displayed after a user completes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or fills out a contact form.

Test variations with your visitors

As soon as you have your new pages up and running it is time to set the experiment in Google Website Optimizer. This is simple as 1-2-3. When the experiment is created you need to add the original page, variations of the pages, and the conversion page URLs.  Next, you need to do is to add Google’s tracking code to each of your test pages. The last thing you need to do before starting the experiment is to set the % of the total traffic sent through this experiment.

Analyze what changes drive most conversions

Keep the experiment running as long as it is necessary to get conclusive results. Even Google will show you which of your variations is the “winner”.

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The information Google provides such as Estimated Conversion Rate, Chances to Beat the Original and Conversions will give you a clear picture of the best performing variation.

So, as you can see the A/B test is very simple to be done and the results can bring great value in learning what the visitors are looking for on your website. An optimized landing page will even make the visitors appreciate you more because you give them the value they are looking for.