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Video Summary
Everyone wants traffic to their website, but traffic is useless unless you’re able to convert it into new prospects, new customers and new clients.
To help you do this, and optimize your website for its full potential, Google introduced a free tool called Optimize or Google Optimize, as it’s sometimes called, to help businesses start making results-based improvements to their websites.
Continue watching to know which test you should use.
Video Transcript
Who wants a free tool? I do!
How about a free tool that can improve your website’s conversion rates?
Did that catch your attention? Yeah? Sign me up!
Everyone wants traffic to their website, but traffic is useless unless you’re able to convert it into new prospects, new customers and new clients. According to Google, “Every user is unique, and your website should address their individual tastes.” In other words, your website works best when it addresses the uniqueness of each and every visitor to your site.
Google Optimize
To help you do this, and optimize your website for its full potential, Google introduced a free tool called Optimize or Google Optimize, as it’s sometimes called, to help businesses start making results-based improvements to their websites. This free tool from Google’s Marketing Platform “allows you to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against an objective that you specify.”
Essentially, the tool allows you to run different types of experiments, including A/B tests, redirect tests, and multivariate tests to determine which version works best with your audience. Any of these tests can be used for conversion rate optimization. Which test you should use is based on your personal needs and preferences as well as the amount of traffic your website gets.
With Google Optimize you create a hypothesis and then test that hypothesis using an Optimize experiment. For example, your thought process could be something as simple as “What would happen if we changed the title on the sales page of our site?” That’s a good start. Now get more specific. What is the current title? What would you change it to?
Your hypothesis could be, “When we change our title from the original title to the new title, our sales will increase.” But you really don’t know if that would be the case. A new title could destroy the conversion on your page. That’s why you want to test it before you roll it out to everyone.
So now that you have a hypothesis, you have something you can test with Google Optimize. You can set up an experiment to see which headline gives you the best result for the traffic that goes to your site.
What else could you test? You could test new website layouts, designs, buttons, colors, and content changes including text and photos. Every time you complete a new test, you will know what gives you the best results when your real-world visitors interact with your site.
You don’t have to guess what will work better because Google Optimize uses Google Analytics to measure your conversions and monitor your results.
How to Use Google Optimize for your Business
Okay, so how do you use Google Optimize to make a big difference for your business?
The answer is that you combine Optimize with your various marketing strategies including PPC advertising, email marketing, and social media. In each case, you’re sending people to your website, right? So test changes on the landing pages you send them to.
This way you constantly improve your results. With each iteration, you improve your advertising ROI by making changes that better appeal to your audience.
How is this Valuable for You?
Well, let’s say you get 500 people to your website, and you get 5 people to contact you as a result. That’s a 1% conversion rate. To double the number of people who contact you can either have to double the traffic or double the conversion rate.
Most businesses think of doubling traffic. And that works, but what’s the cost? Let’s say you’re paying $1 in advertising for each visitor. In this case you’re paying $500 to get those 500 people to your website. And since you’re getting 5 people to contact you that’s $500 divided by 5, which means you’re paying $100 per contact.
To double your traffic, you would have to double your ad budget and start paying $1,000 to get 1,000 people to your site. Maybe that traffic is worth the cost. You’ll have to decide.
But what if you could double the conversion rate instead? What if you could go from 1% to 2% conversion. Now those same 500 people, with 2% converting, gives you 10 contacts. No increase in advertising costs. You just made your advertising more effective because now you divide $500 by 10, and you’re only paying $50 per contact.
Your cost to acquire a new client just got much cheaper. By using Optimize to run test after test, you can continue to find ways to improve your conversion rates and continue to bring down your acquisition costs.
If you optimize your conversion rate before you increase your ad spend, you really stretch your advertising dollars.
So, is Google Optimize right for you?
Well, since you’re here, the answer is probably Yes! If you design websites, create content, or own a business, then you can benefit from this tool.
Google specifically says that “Marketers can run experiments on landing pages to increase conversions, publishers can test how different site layouts affect stickiness, social media managers can experiment with different sharing strategies, and designers can test new website designs”.
Basically, if you have a website and you’re trying to move your visitors to a specific outcome, then Google Optimize can help.
Google Optimize has different types of experiments, so which one should you use?
There are 3 different types of experiments you can set up with Optimize. And I’m going to show you a live example of each type.
What are the 3 Types of Experiments?
A/B Test
First is the A/B Test. A/B testing basically compares two or more versions of the same web page or an element on a page to see which one performs better. With Optimize you are not limited to 2 versions. You can create as many variants as you would like to test.
But with all testing, keep in mind that the more you test at once, the more traffic you need because you want to get significant results.
A simple example of an A/B test could be changing the color of the Buy button on your website, where the A is the original which has the color red, and the B is the variant which has the color green. Or maybe you already figured out that green was the best color, so now you want to test the original button size against a larger button size.
Redirect Test
The second type of test is the Redirect Test. Redirect tests are really a type of A/B test, but in this case, instead of comparing elements on a page, it tests two or more different web pages against each other.
These two pages might still focus on changing a single element, but with a redirect it allows you to test radically different pages against each other. You might do this if you’re testing your existing page design against a new design.
Multivariate Test
The third type of test is the Multivariate Test. With a multivariate test you can test multiple elements and combinations at the same time. While A/B tests show you the best resulting variable, multivariate tests classify interactions between different variables and elements and the combination of those.
In other words, you could test button color and size simultaneously. And when the test is complete you will know which color and which size work best together. And that’s really cool, but you need a lot more traffic to get to a statistically significant result with a multivariate test.
Consider an A/B test of button colors, half the traffic that comes to the page will see one version and half will see the other. If you need 100 visits on each version before you know the results, that means you need 200 visitors. For the multivariate test with just 2 colors and 2 sizes, there are 4 combinations so you would need 400 visitors to reach significance. That’s double the traffic to get the results.
Now I’m not saying that 100 visitors per variant is what you need. That’s just an example to illustrate. You might see results sooner if your audience responds much better to one version or the other. Or you might need a lot more traffic before you know the answer if your audience is not heavily influenced by any particular change.
In order to work, Optimize needs a minimum of one experiment session per day, per variant. So, with an A/B test or Redirect test, 2 visits per day is the minimum. With a multivariate test, 4 visits per day is the minimum.
How Do You Know When the Experiments are Finished?
Google Optimize does not declare a winner unless the experiment has been running successfully for at least 2 weeks. So that’s the minimum amount of time. The experiments will continue to run until a winner is found, where one variant has a 95% or higher probability to be the winner.
Experiments also have maximum durations. At this time if your experiment connects to Google’s Universal Analytics, experiments can run for up to 90 days. If your experiment is connected to Google’s newer analytics platform called Google Analytics 4, the maximum duration is 35 days.
What this means is that you really want to get enough traffic through your experiment so that an answer is determined by the end of the experiment duration. The good news, even if you don’t have a clear winner by the end, you may see a trend that helps you pick the better choice or set up a new test.
With all these benefits, have you finally decided to try Google Optimize?
In upcoming videos, I will show you how to set up each type of experiment. Look for the links below and be sure to subscribe to my channel so you get notified when future videos are published.
I also have a separate video about A/B Split Testing and a tool that helps you determine the winner of split tests. This is especially important if you have data but you’re not using a sophisticated tool like Google Optimize.
Your business deserves to be seen online, and I will help you get there. Thanks for watching and have a great day!
