For those of you who don't know what split testing is, let me explain..



Say you have a page setup for gathering leads, it consists of a header, a few short bullet points, your lead capture form and your footer. Let's say this original page has a conversion rate of 6% - for every 100 visitors the page recieves, 6 of them fill out the form and submit it.

When you split test, you create numerous variations of this original page, each variation being slightly different (usually only 1 change per variation). So, in one variation you might change the header, in another you might change the bullet points and so on. You then use a split testing script that rotates your traffic to one of these various pages you've setup. You continue this process until you find the best converting combination possible. For a normal lead capture, most people aim for 30-45% before retiring their efforts.

With Google Website Optimizer, you can test all combinations of your page at once.

Here's how it works..

First, you supply the original page you'd like to create variations of; this can be a lead capture, a sales page, whatever page leads to a conversion of some sort. Next, you supply the successful conversion page. For a lead capture, your conversion page would be your thank you page, for a sales process, it may be the "thanks for your order" page and so on.

Now you're able to break the page you want to test into as many different sections as you'd like by inserting simple javascript into the page. For a common lead capture page, you might break it into a header, bullet points, lead capture form, and footer, but it's entirely up to you how many sections you want to use.

After you've broken down your page into sections, it's now time to create variations of each of the different sections.

The first site I tried with Google Website Optimizer was an old lead capture page that I hadn't got around to optimizing. I broke the page into 4 sections (header,bullet points, form, and footer).

I then created 1 variation for each section. For the header, I tried a shorter version of the header with slightly different wording. For the bullet points, I tried shortening them and getting rid of one of the bullet points. For the form, I created a version with a custom question field (the original is just name/email). And for the footer variation, I added a post script that said, "P.S - You will only see this page once, so don't miss out on this one time offer!".

The results are in!

After letting it run for roughly 3 days and a few hundred visitors, I successfully took the original conversion rate of 6% and increased it by over 500%! That means I'm now seeing a conversion rate of 30% - all it took was 15 minutes of my time to setup the Google Website Optimizer.

So what was the best combination?

The winning combination was the original header, the shorter bullets with one removed, the original form, and the footer that had the added post script.

I'm going to continue testing this page with a few different variations and see if I can't get it closer to a 50% conversion rate.

So what does this mean to my bottom line?

Well, if this were a PPC campaign I would have just cut my cost per conversion by 500%. If that was a large budget campaign, that could mean saving thousands of dollars per month.

Overall, I have to say, the Google Website Optimizer is a great product, and the fact that it's free for Adwords advertisers is even better. Now if only they could clean up their search results..but that's a topic for a different story.

You can sign up for Google Website Optimizer at http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/