Making Data-Driven Business Decisions With Google Website Optimizer
Written by Martin Wong on May 31, 2010
In the marketing industry, a lot of important decisions are based on nothing more than educated guesswork. This is because for most businesses, the cost of doing customer research through focus groups and opinion polling is prohibitively expensive. But what if there was a cost effective solution where small businesses could easily test the effectiveness of their online marketing material? Well, there is, and it’s called Google Website Optimizer.
Google Website Optimizer is an easy-to-use tool offered by Google to help business conduct split and multivariate (3-way or more) testing. It provides you with a powerful tool to increase your conversion rate with its easy testing system. To give an example of just how powerful this tool can be for your business, let’s look at one of the most famous examples of conversion split-testing.
How Barack Obama’s Campaign Used Google Website Optimizer
One of the reasons for Barack Obama’s landslide election win in 2008 was his use of social media and conversion testing to fine-tune the effectiveness of his message. Instead of relying on a team of political experts to make all the decisions, his campaign employed multivariate testing to see which message actually best resonated with voters. His web analytics team was a fronted by Dan Siroker, a former Google employee with extensive conversion optimization experience.
The centerpiece of Obama’s campaign was his online social community My Barack Obama. Primarily through online donations at this website, Obama raised a record-breaking $500 million dollars from 6.5 million donations. The average online donation was $80 and many donors donated multiple times. In September 2008, Obama’s website had it’s biggest month of the campaign, raising $100 million dollars from online donations.
Image-Based Conversion Testing
To maximize the effectiveness of his campaign website, Obama’s analytics team used Google Website Optimizer to run multivariate tests on important pages throughout the website. On the pivotal campaign sign up page, where the initial contact is established with potential supporters, a multivariate test was run to compare the following three call-to-action images:
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Of these 3 images, which do you think would be the most successful at motivating people to sign up and support Obama’s campaign?
The Get Involved call-to-action on the left was the original image which the other 2 images were tested against. The Change call-to-action image in the middle resulted in 3.85% more people signing up to support the campaign. But it was the Family call-to-action image that was by far the most successfully with 13.1% more people joining the website.
Button-Based Conversion Testing
The web analytics teams also tested four different combinations of the Sign Up button to see which would be most effective. In addition to the original Sign Up call-to-action button, they used mutli-variate testing to compare buttons with the call-to-actions Learn More, Join Us Now and Sign Up Now. Any guesses as to which button was most effective?
It may not be what you think. The Join Us Now was marginally more effective with 1.37% more clicks and the Sign Up Now was slightly less effective than the original with -2.38% drop in clicks. But the Learn More button showed a substantial conversion improvement with 18.6% more clicks. The result was that by these small seemingly minor improvements to the call-to-actions buttons Obama’s campaign was able to substantially increase the number of potential voters who signed up to support his campaign.
What Can You Do With Website Optimizer?
Google Website Optimizer can be an extremely effective tool for your business. Even without a substantial increase in your web traffic, multivariate conversion testing can increase the amount of sales or leads that you generate from your current amount of traffic. If your website’s call-to-action messages aren’t optimized in a way that fully engages your potential customers, you’re leaving money on the table.
You can use Google Website Optimizer to not only compare call-to-action images and buttons, but also to compare different versions of headlines and marketing copy. Using this powerful conversion optimization tool, you can take the guesswork out of online marketing and start making data-driven business decisions that will maximize your revenue.
If you have questions about how to employ Google Website Optimizer for your website, please visit our web analytics consultation page.
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