Site Optimization – Using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Together

Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer and Google Ad words – these three are critical in promoting/optimizing your site. Here, their combined power lies in providing us with the most valuable and effective information. They maximize our “Right” decision making power which is the most important in the internet marketing field. All these three applications combined can answer most of your queries and concerns relating to your website. Thus, they provide you with the best sort out options to improve your website performance.

This may give you a clear picture of the power that you will possess if you will combine your Google website optimizer and Google Analytics tools. In this article, we’ll talk about things to consider for such a combination.

Overview – Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a robust analytics application, which reports key information of your site traffic and their behavior. It will provide you with this information in the form of a variety of easily understandable reports. Thus, Google Analytics gives you an insight into the user behavior on your site. The information that we obtain from Google Analytics will be helpful in making the right decisions to maximize the website performance. The best thing is that you can open a Google Analytics account absolutely free. You can perform your analysis on the visitor data this tool provides according to your online business needs.

Overview – Google Website Optimizer
Now let us look at what Google Website Optimizer has in store for you. Google Website Optimizer helps you to conduct statistical tests on your sites’ pages that enhance the effectiveness of your site. Every site has a goal to achieve. It may be to purchase a product, donate to a cause or take a survey. The goal of your site depends upon the nature of your website. Website Optimizer can track the nature of visitor performance by virtue of Google Analytics. It gives you information about the conversion rate i.e. the number of visitors behaved according to your predefined goals. The tool is primarily focused on giving analyst the solution to conduct A/B tests or multivariate testing on your site’s layout and designs.

To make best use of the valuable data obtained from Google Analytics, it is necessary to utilize it together with Google Website Optimizer. Google Website Optimizer will empower you to create and run specific tests regarding the website content in order to increase the conversion rate and thus improve your visitor satisfaction. All of us are aware of the fact that an improvement in visitor satisfaction is the highlighting point of the best performing websites. Thus, Google Website Optimizer helps you to convert the information provided by Google Analytics into action, which guarantees the best result. Website optimizer is accessed through the Google Website Optimizer (http:www.google.com/websiteoptimizer).

The variables on which you can conduct experiments through Google Website Optimizer are innumerable. You can run tests on the variables such as changing the page background color, testing different ad copy, different images, different headlines, different positioning, and different layouts and designs to the combination of size and location buttons, trust logos, affiliation links, etc.

Basic combination of the two powerful web tools of analytics and optimization:
By integrating Google Analytics tool into your Website Optimizer, you will get a rich data and will give you insight into the progress of your tests. To cut the matter short, while Google Analytics inform you about what is happening on your site, Google Website Optimizer gives you the power to change your site for increased conversion rates.

To get the best results out of the two, you should combine both the tools in the best effective way. Here are some ways to do it.

• The landing page content definitely creates a positive or negative impact on the visitors. It plays an important role in determining the visitor activity. If your landing page provides what the visitor needs then it can result in an increase in the conversion rate. If you optimize your website’s low traffic pages, it will not give you any positive outcome. You should optimize a high traffic landing pages that show a high bounce rate. Google Analytics will help you in this task. For this purpose, analyze the “Top landing pages” report within the content section of Google Analytics. Pages that have the high bounce rate and the highest percentage of entrances should be redesigned. Bounce rate is the number of visitors who retract their steps within a short time span. Thus, from the data obtained from Google Analytics use Google Optimizer to redesign your site and help to increase the web traffic.
• Focus on your funnel pages: Funnel pages are those pages that lead your visitors to your goal pages. Visitors finally will enter the goal page, once they have completed the desired steps such as registering on your site, a purchase or a download. In Google Analytics, you can determine up to ten pages in a defined funnel depending upon the path you want them to take as to reach the goal page. The “Funnel visualization” report within the goals section of Google Analytics shows you the trend of the visitors who have excited in between on the path to the goal page. Thus, pages that lose a high percentage of traffic on the path towards goal should be the next perfect part on your site to conduct optimization test.

These steps will definitely provide a good working of both the tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer combined. If you work according to the information and take necessary steps by using both these tools, you could expect a better web traffic and high monetary gains.

Possible testing strategies you can consider conducting:

• Time on page as a conversion goal
• Advanced A/B Testing
• Experimenting with dynamic content
• Tracking all movement past the landing page
• Improve your newsletter subscription rate
• Fractional versus Full Factorial analysis
• Experiment with site-wide changes
• Comparing old vs. new website designs
• Testing the same section across many pages
• Testing many sections across multiple pages
• Counting a conversion when a link is clicked
• A simple solution to cross-domain tracking
• Counting a conversion when a form is submitted

WARNING!!!

What you need to aware of when installing Website Optimizer code when you have Google Analytics code already set in place.

According to Google (in website optimizer help):
If your web pages are tagged with Google Analytics’ ga.js tracking code, we suggest modifying that code for use with Website Optimizer, rather than adding a call to urchin.js as well. Calling two essentially similar JavaScript files to be downloaded onto the user’s machine is inefficient, and can slow down loading of your pages (although only very slightly).
Note that Website Optimizer doesn’t currently validate pages using ga.js, so you’ll either need to skip validation for multivariate experiments, or validate your A/B experiments with the urchin.js tracking code before switching to ga.js. Also, any modifications to the tracking code (such as those required to cross domains) increase the level of complexity, so we suggest that less-technical users continue to use urchin.js for both Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.

You definitely need to consult with your tech team and make sure that implementing Website Optimizer won’t affect your current trackings or metrics data.

Additionally, there may be issues around integrating Website Optimizer when you’re tracking an e-commerce site using Google Analytics. Website Optimizer may affect your e-commerce data and pollute your numbers.

Check out the Google Website Optimizer Forum (http://groups.google.com/group/websiteoptimizer) and scope out your requirements prior to making tracking changes.