Case Study: Universal Technical Institute Increases Application Requests Eight-fold With Website Optimizer
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team
New Year, New Asynchronous Tags for GWO
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team
Welcome, Google Apps users!
Update your Website Optimizer scripts to secure your site
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team
New Google Website Optimizer Online Video Training Released!
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team
Join Website Optimizer at eMetrics & Conversion Conference in Washington DC
Creating Targeted Tests using DoubleClick Ad Planner and Website Optimizer
Testing is probably the most effective way to optimize websites. Through testing we can understand what our customers like, which ultimately will help us create a better customer experience for our audience. But "our audience" is usually not a unique type of person; it is important use techniques such as Test Segmentation to understand the differences in the tastes of each cluster of customers.
However, where can you get ideas for tests? How do you choose, for example, if you should use an image of a man, a woman, a couple, a baby or a family? Most of us do not have the privilege of testing the YouTube homepage: traffic is limited for most sites, so it is important to run tests that have a high chance of making a difference. We have to focus our efforts on our best guesses. In this post, we will show a way to use DoubleClick Ad Planner to research for testing ideas that will be tailor made to the segments you are trying to target in your website.
Finding Your Audience on Ad Planner
In a recent blog post on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog, the DoubleClick Ad Planner mission is described as:
...to provide the deepest, most accurate insight into online audiences possible. This insight helps display advertisers select the best sites for their media plans and drive results for their campaigns.
However, I believe this description is missing an important part, which is not less important to advertisers: to understand your audience tastes and which kind of websites they like. The DoubleClick Ad Planner provides important insights into how to design your campaign landing pages and your website at all.
So, let's suppose I am working to optimize the eMetrics Summit website for the San Francisco conference in 2011. The Summit targets marketing managers, web analysts and business intelligence experts that are trying to understand how to increase the return on online investments. Here is how to find the tastes and preferences of this audience:
- Sign in to DoubleClick Ad Planner and create a new Media plan;
- Go to Research tab, choose the Research by Audience secondary tab;
- Choose among the various segmentation options in order to narrow the audience and the websites they visit. Below are the segments chosen for eMetrics San Francisco audience:
- Geography: chose country USA and refined it to include only West Coast states. That's the main target for this show since eMetrics also hosts a Washington DC conference
- Demographics: included both males and females, between 25 and 44 years old, with at least a bachelor degree, with a household income above $75K. I think this segment is very close to the audience of the conference (but I have no inside information)
- Online Activity: chose a large website that the audience is likely to visit: Google Analytics
- Interests: chose everything under 'Business' and 'Computers & Electronics'
- Ranking Method: chose the ranking method to be 'Best Match' since we are not doing this analysis in order to find a place to advertise (in which case we might sort the websites by reach), but to find a place that our target likes to visit
Below is a screenshot from DoubleClick Ad Planner showing all the segmenting options and the audience created above. We can call the list created below "Website Testing Inspiration"
Getting Ideas for Your Test
Once we find the "Website Testing Inspiration" table, which shows the websites where our targeted audience is surfing around, we have the raw material necessary to get ideas for our testing efforts. Continuing our example above, we can visit the websites in the Top 10 websites that match our audience and start analyzing them.
So, here are a few insights from the analysis above for the eMetrics San Francisco home:
- First of all, looks like Jim Sterne chose the right color, blue is very prominent in all the websites;
- Idea #1: it could be worth a try to add some geeky machines to the page, such as in the Pitney Bowes, Kaiser Permanente and Frys websites;
- Idea #2: call these companies and have someone present at eMetrics and feature it at the conference homepage;
- Idea #3: submit a post to both TechCrunch and Gizmodo, which would certainly be happy to feature interesting content about social media metrics. The posts would be useful in order to promote the conference and, in terms of testing, the eMetrics homepage could try featuring in a prominent place that the conference is being quoted in these websites (something like "In the news");
- Idea #4: interesting to see that Stack Overflow is number 5 on the list, a website for "professional and enthusiast programmers". It looks like many technical people are inside this audience. Maybe it could be worthwhile to try showing a classification on the site targeting different types of people: "Programmers only talks", "Business Minded talks", "Marketers, Statisticians and liars"...
Bonus: Instead of looking for your audience and which sites they visit, you can also look into your competitors' sites and understand which segments they are attracting that you are not. Read more about it on Avinash's post: Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google / DoubleClick Ad Planner.
Website Optimizer at eMetrics San Jose and Conversion Conference West next week
- 11am - Introduction to Website Optimizer session (I’m giving this session)
- 1:50pm - What’s New with Google Analytics with Brett Crosby
- 2pm - Web Analytics & Uncovering Problems with Eric Peterson & Brett Crosby
- 9am - Keynote: Leveraging Bleeding Edge Analytics Goodies with Avinash Kaushik
- 12:15pm - Brown Bag Deep Dive with Google Analytics product manager, Jayanth Mysore
Website Optimizer system upgrade coming soon
Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team
25 Google Website Optimizer Tips for Better Product Pages
- Home page to cart page funnel
- General checkout process funnel including the cart page
- General checkout process funnel excluding the cart page
- Checkout process funnel for different payment types including the cart page
- Checkout process funnel for different payment types excluding the cart page
4. Funnels & visitors. Beyond setting up funnels is segmenting your traffic and examining how it moves in funnels. But how do you do that in Google Analytics? We will let you in on a small secret:
- Setup the different funnels in Google Analytics
- Setup different profiles to represent the different segments
- Now, you can examine each of the funnels for the different profiles
- Micro conversion goal: When a visitor adds an item to the cart, we count that as a micro conversion.
- Macro conversion: When the visitor completes an order, we count a macro conversion.
- Test the impact of having the standard manufacturer's description versus custom copy your team creates. What impact does this have on the micro conversion (visitors adding items to their cart)?
- Test different versions of the custom copy you create: Not all copy created equal. You might want to test technical copy versus non-technical. Consider the different market segments and what words will have the most impact on them.
- Test the location of the add to cart button
- Test different designs of the add to cart button
- Test the wording on the add to cart buttons
- Most ecommerce packages provide a way to maintain a single price for a product. Plan on a strategy for testing multiple prices:
- Price A is the original price
- Price B is the original price x 1.10 (10% increase)
- Price C is the original price x 0.90 (10% decrease)
- Bad: No product availability on your site
- Good: Always display product availability
- Excellent: Display messages to encourage customers to buy a product if you have limited stock available (Only 5 left in stock -- order soon.)
- Electric
- Grease tray
- Non-stick cooking surface
- Temperature control
- 300 square inches of cooking space
- Attached working surface
- Convenience
- Electric
- Non-stick cooking surface
- Attached working surface
- Electric
- Non-stick cooking surface
- Temperature control
- Attached working surface
- Electric
- Temperature control
- Tasty, Healthy Food Every time
- Temperature control
- Grease tray
- 300 square inches of cooking space
- Attached working area
- Easy to clean
- Electric versus charcoal emissions
- Do not have to buy charcoal for the life of the grill
