Google's Content Experiments: A New Way To Optimize And Analyze Your Site
Once again, Google has raised the bar of web page optimization. It recently unveiled and rolled out to all Google Analytics users its Content Experiments, a new way to optimize and analyze websites and bring in the profits.
An Overview
Integrated into Google Analytics, Content Experiments was developed by Google to help marketers discover the best design, layout, structure or content of a web page. It makes use of a series of experiments to determine which performs best to meet a website’s goals. Some of these goals would be getting your visitors to make a purchase, register for membership, sign up for a newsletter or download a file.
With Content Experiments, you are able to come up with different versions of a page and allow different visitors to view these different versions. You can play with headlines and headers, icons and images, text, calls to action or page layout. Google Analytics gauges the performance of each page using a sophisticated statistical machine to determine the best version. The chosen version will then go live for all visitors.
An Example
Let’s take the case of a content marketing site. You offer quality content to marketers, marketing agencies and small businesses. Your goal is to promote your content marketing solutions to more clients.
Typically, the first page that visitors land on is your homepage. Use this page for your experiment. Proceed to create a few versions of your homepage – one with a new, bold and colored headline, another which highlights the benefits of your content marketing solution that are not found in other solutions, and a last one in which you provide an attractive icon next to the link for registering.
You can now launch your experiment. At this point, some visitors will see one version while others will see the other versions, including your original homepage. Testing period may vary from two weeks to three months. At the end of the testing period, Google Analytics analyzes which version gets the most visitors to register. You then choose the page that gets the highest percentage of conversions for all visitors to see.
The Benefits
Search and optimization experts all agree that the main benefit of Google’s Content Experiments is the creation of more efficient websites that lead to better conversion rates and ultimately improved bottom lines. As a website owner or webmaster, you stand to experience better user interaction with Content Experiments because of the following advantages:
- It is a one-stop shop for analyzing, optimizing and selecting your best web pages to improve your bottom line because it is integrated with Google Analytics.
- It simplifies website testing because you only have to follow the screen instructions and the test will go live in minutes.
- It provides more accurate quantitative results by using highly reliable statistical engines.
- It is the most suitable tool if you’re just starting out with A/B or split testing and conversion rate optimization or CRO.
Google’s Content Experiments is an excellent tool that takes guesswork out of website analysis and optimization. With accurate and correct statistical data, you can make more informed decisions to improve website efficiency, enhance visitor experience, create leads, generate conversions and increase revenues.