In my last post, I introduced Google Website Optimiser.  This free testing platform allows you to run variations of your existing web pages and track what content produces the most sales and leads on your site.  Tweaking web content influences customer behaviour, and can bring you big conversion wins.  In preparation for creating variations of your current content, it's worth deciding which pages are highest priority to test.  Here are ideas for how 

to do this, with practical examples of Google Analytics

 reports which will help you.

High Traffic Landing Pages

From my experience with AdWords, I would often see advertisers build out well structured ad campaigns and then make the simple mistake of linking the ad's destination URL to the home page of their site, rather than a specific product page related to their ad.  More often than not, this would lead to a high bounce rate and clicks that would not result in sales or leads. In general, website visitors only spend a few seconds scanning the page they reach after they've clicked on an ad. If the product or service they're looking for isn't immediately visible, they will leave. 

So what's the lesson here (apart from ensuring that you direct your ads to the most relevant pages of your site)? Answer: landing pages are high value, high importance pages for your advertising.  A landing page is your visitors' first (and all too often, last) impression of your website. As landing pages normally receive high traffic levels, they impact strongly on whether users pursue their shopping / information goals on your site.

For all these reasons, landing pages present a great opportunity for web optimisation.  If you can make your landing pages clearer and more compelling, more visitors will stay on your site and go on to buy / enquire with you.  The traffic you're working hard to drive to your site will be more likely to convert, meaning more profit for your business (at no extra cost).

You can identify your highest traffic landing pages easily using Google Analytics.  To do so, click on the 'Top Landing Pages' (see image below) report within the Content section of your account. This report will enable you to identify high traffic landing pages which also have a high bounce rate and thus are ripe for optimisation. 

The Google Analytics 'Top Landing Pages report' (Content Section) shows a list of top landing pages ordered by the amount of traffic on the left. On the right hand side of the report, you can view the Bounce Rate of the landing pages compared to site average. To view this report, select the 'compare to graph' option on the right hand side and select the drop down for bounce rate. Pages with a high amount of visitors and a high bounce rate (red bar), are good candidates for optimization.

Funnel pages

Other high value pages to test are those contained within a path leading to a funnel conversion goal. A 'funnel' is a series of pages through which a visitor must pass before reaching the conversion goal. The purpose of tracking these pages is to see how efficiently your pages direct visitors to your goal. If you identify any pages within a funnel which have a high drop off rate, then these should be seen as a priority to optimise, as they are restricting the amount of users reaching the conversion goal. 

For example, let's say you want users on your company's site to submit an application form.  Each step leading up to application submission is a step in the conversion funnel, with the 'Thank you for submitting' page as the final goal page.  You'd like to improve conversions and you're wondering about your site content.  Could the application form contain too many fields for customers to fill in, or could the information required from customers be difficult for them to locate?  Factors like this could deter visitors from completing your form.  But what if you could identify which page of your conversion funnel had the highest bounce / drop off rate?  You would then know that this was a great page to make changes to and test in order to increase the number of conversions on the site.

In Google Analytics, you can specify up to ten pages in a defined funnel and these represent the path that you expect visitors to take on their way to the goal page.  Once you have created a funnel within Google Analytics, you can view the 'Funnel Visualisation' report located in the Goals section of your account. This report shows you how many visitors exit the funnel at each step in the path towards the goal page. 

In the funnel visualisation below, we've taken another example: a retailer who wants visitors to their site to buy from them.  You can see that most visitors in this funnel are lost in the final transition from the 'View Shopping Cart' step to the 'Completed Order'. Only 2% of visitors move past this step to actually complete an order, so this would be an ideal page to start testing in order to greatly improve results.

The Google Analytics Funnel Visualisation report (Goals Section) shows the pages where visitors drop out of the funnel path. Pages that lose a high percentage of traffic on the path towards a website goal are good candidates for optimization.

That's all for now on choosing pages to test using Website Optimiser. I hope you find these principles useful as you drive conversion success through website optimisation.

Posted By Edward Jackson, Google Website Optimizer Team

Over the last few weeks, we have discussed techniques for monitoring your website's performance using Google Analytics. With the reporting Analytics provides, you may havenoticed areas you'd like to work on. For example, if your homepage has a very high bounce rate, or people are leaving your sales / enquiry form pages too early, how do you fix this in order to turn more visitors into paying customers? Website Optimiser gives you the opportunity to test variations of your current web pages to see what content works best on your site.

What is Website Optimiser?

So what is it? Website Optimiser is a free testing platform and optimisation tool which allows you to run different variations of your site’s content simultaneously. Your incoming traffic is automatically split so that each variation of a web page you want to test is exposed to equal proportions of your visitors. Website Optimiser then tracks which variation is most successful in generating conversions for you, i.e. sales, leads, or any other action you deem valuable. Using Website Optimiser to test and improve your site content, you can dramatically increase revenue and ROI, and it doesn't cost a penny.

For example, let's say you feel there's room for improvement on your landing page. You've noticed it has a high bounce rate, but you're not quite sure how to fix this. Is there too much text on the page? Should you make the call to action button bigger? Should you add / remove imagery or links? You go ahead and create a new 'improved' page variation. Instead of taking a leap in the dark and trying to guess whether the new page performs better than the old page, you can use Website Optimiser to find out. Once the test has been launched, Website Optimiser will divide your traffic between the two pages and will then advise you via detailed reporting as to which page drives more leads/sales.

Why should I start using Google Website Optimiser?

1. Increase conversions: It's not uncommon when optimising key web pages for a few small changes to double, or even triple, conversion rates. You put a lot of time and effort into driving traffic to your site. Why risking losing visitors you've worked so hard to bring on board? Tweaking and testing web content could increase your site's conversion rate so that you're getting a higher return on investment from the same volume of visitors.

2. Eliminate guesswork from site design: Why base design decisions on assumptions? Instead of trying to guess what button converts best, or which headline is the most compelling, let Website Optimiser take the guesswork out of site design, by leveraging empirical data from real visitors.

3. Improve landing pages: Reduce the number of would-be customers you lose through ineffective landing pages. Website Optimiser's automated testing makes it easy to fix and deploy compelling web pages.

4. It's really easy to use: You don't have to be a statistical genius to use the tool. Providing you have the new page variations ready, you can set up tests in under 10 minutes.

Still not convinced? See what our advertisers have to say about Website Optimiser.

Where do I begin?

Visit Google.com/WebsiteOptimiser to sign up for your free Website Optimiser account and further details on testing best practices.

Posted by Edward Jackson, Website Optimiser Team

Adding a search box to your site not only offers your visitors an important ease-of-use feature, but provides you, the site owner, with powerful insight into what your visitors really expect from your site. If you don't have a search box on your site, you might consider using the Google Custom Search Engine (both free and paid versions are available). If you already have a search box, make sure that you're tracking visitor search activity.

You can learn more about how to make effective use of internal site search information in this article, Five Questions to Ask of Your Site Search Data.

We've also just released a new video on tracking internal site search.



Posted By Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

This week we want to let you know about some free Google-run trainings that are coming up.

AdWords Webinars

We run a regular series of webinars covering various AdWords features and Google products. These training and discussion sessions are free and can be accessed from the comfort of your own computer! We've highlighted a few of the webinars below which could help you further improve conversions on your website. If you're interested in a particular session you can simply click on the link to register.

Conversion Optimiser:
For AdWords users who would like to learn how to get more conversions at a lower cost-per-conversion from AdWords search and content campaigns.

Google Analytics I:
Aimed at AdWords users who are not currently using Google Analytics or users who are very new to the product.

Google Analytics II:
Aimed at users with more complex websites, such as subdomains or 3rd party shopping carts. Also recommended for those that have a familiarity with the product and would like learn more about advanced set ups.

Google Analytics III:
Aimed at Advertisers who have already set up Google Analytics and are tracking data. Discover how to navigate reports and use Analytics data to optimise your AdWords account.

Website Optimiser:
An introduction to Website Optimiser and website testing. This event is for users who are actively tracking their websites conversions and who are looking to make further site changes to improve conversion rates.

You can find full details of all our English language webinars here and links to other languages below:

German: www.google.de/adwords/webinars

Spanish: www.google.es/adwords/webinars

French: www.google.fr/adwords/webinars

Italian: www.google.it/adwords/webinars

Dutch: www.google.nl/adwords/webinars

Live Google Seminars at TFM&A

On February 24th and 25th we will be running live Google seminars at the TFM&A event in London's Earls Court. This event is free to attend and you can register here.

We will have two Master classes where product specialists will discuss Google Analytics and Website Optimser. These sessions are free to attend for TFM&A attendees, but places will be limited so try to arrive early.

Google Analytics
Tuesday 24th February: 10.00 - 11.00 in the Keynote Theatre

Website Optimser
Wednesday 25th February: 10.00 - 11.00 in the Keynote Theatre

We hope you can make it to some of the sessions! As ever, if you have any feedback on how we can improve our blog please send us an email.

Posted By Evelyn O'Keeffe, Google Analytics Team

In my last post, I covered the importance of using key performance indicators and shared some ideas for building a KPI list. It's good to think about what metrics you need to run your online business. The question remains though: how does this translate into reports you can access in Analytics, and data you and your team can act on? Today, we're going to take a look at a sample company and scenario to delve into using KPIs, and Analytics data, in practice.



Business Objectives and KPI List
Let's take the example of a small company that sells car parts for vintage cars online. The site also has an active user community. The Google Analytics manager from this example company wants to put a set of KPIs together for the person who runs their online marketing campaigns. Together they set the following business objective:

Get more quality visitors to the site.

They want to attract more people to the site but also want to ensure they attract 'the right people'. They define 'the right people' as ones who will buy parts from them, but will also engage and interact on the site. They were able to break their overall objective into the following sub-objectives and map these to KPIs in their Google Analytics account.

Sub-Objective	KPI	Report in Google Analytics
Have more people visit the website	Number of unique visitors	Visitors > Visitor Trending > Absolute Unique Visitors
Ensure there's a return on marketing efforts	ROI of online campaigns	Traffic Sources > AdWords > AdWords Campaigns (Clicks tab)
Have more people buy car parts from the website	Ecommerce conversion rate	E-commerce > Conversion Rate
Have more people register to be a user on the site	Goal completion rate of 'new registrations'	Goals > Conversion Rate
Increase the number of interactions people have on the site	Goal completion rate of 'new comment posts'	Goals > Conversion Rate
Increase the percentage of returning visitors	Percentage of returning visitors	Visitors > New Vs Returning
Increase the number of 'branded visits '	Percentage of visits that come from direct or branded keywords	Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits (apply branded visitors segment )

As I mentioned in my last post it's important to know who you are giving your KPI update to and give them the context and detail they require to do their job. To provide context to his KPI report their Google Analytics manager is going to do a few things. Firstly he is going to compare each of the metrics he has accessed to a previous time period. Secondly he is going to provide more detail and value by breaking down each of the metrics by their traffic source. If overall conversion rate goes down there's not much the marketing person can do with that data. But if they know that a lower conversion rate is tied to a specific advertising campaign they can take action to optimise the campaign.

KPI report with actions
The next week the Google Analytics manager emails marketing with a status update on each of their KPIs. This week he has highlighted three areas for special attention.

The number of unique visitors is down 21% this week. This figure has dropped every week since December. A drop in unique visitors is expected in January due to seasonality. However, the Analytics data shows the drop had been less severe in previous years, about 15% for the month of January. They now seem to be heading for a drop of 40% for the month. The drop is pretty similar across all traffic sources.



Secondly the number of branded visits has increased. Although overall visitors are down there has been an increase in branded visits to the site.

Finally the ROI of their online campaigns is down. Specifically the AdWords campaign 'new registrations' has had a drop in ROI of 56% for the previous week. This seems to be due an increase in its average cost per click along with a reduction in conversions.

As the rest of the KPIs have remained pretty stable, marketing decide to take action on the above items.

After consideration their marketing contact decides the first two points are related. Unique visitors are down as in the poor economic climate users are not likely to buy cars. However they feel that their site should not be badly affected by this trend: many vintage cars are relatively inexpensive and repairing them yourself as their users do adds value to the cars. Perhaps the positioning of their campaigns needs adjusting - up until now, they've focused on the luxury and prestige of vintage cars, but this positioning may be less appealing now. They decide to create new ad texts in their AdWords account focusing on the more prudent aspects of their offering to see how this performs against the current ads.

The fact that branded visits are up is encouraging. The visitors they are attracting like the site and are returning. This vindicates their decision that the messaging in the campaigns attracting new visitors is what needs to be adjusted. They then investigate the ROI of the 'new registrations' AdWords campaign. The increase in costs has been down to a few keywords that are slightly too general. The 'vintage cars' keyword has cost them $568 this week but only led to one new registration. They know from historical Analytics data that on average a registered user spends $440 over the course of the year. Based on this they decide they are paying too high a price for this keyword, as they are likely to be competing with ads that actually sell vintage cars, rather than just vintage car parts (their own offering). They reduce the keyword's cost per click so it moves below the average revenue per click. They also create some more specific variations on this keyword. They add 'vintage car community' and 'vintage car accessories' to their keyword list in AdWords.

The vintage car parts company have now a) identified KPIs that are important to them, b) put those KPIs in context of trends over time, c) identified focus points and actions to address problems. The likely result? Website performance in areas most important to the company's success should improve, as the company tests new strategies.

Hopefully this example gives you some practical ideas for moving forward with your analysis and web performance. Feel free to email us with any feedback or suggestions.

Posted By Brian O' Sullivan , Google Analytics Team