Today we’d like to highlight a website analysis and testing success story from cottages4you.  

Cottages4you is an online holiday cottage website offering visitors the ability to book holiday properties online or via a cottages4you advisor.

Cottages4you wanted to improve its conversion rate, turning more site visitors into completed reservations. The company consulted its Google Analytics reports in order to see the areas of the website that could benefit from improvement. Google Analytics showed that although many visitors came to the checkout introduction page (below), 40% did not progress further through the checkout funnel to complete a booking.

Cottages4you decided to use Website Optimiser to test a variety of alternative pages in an attempt to increase the number of visitors that continued past the checkout introduction page.

Before:

What to test?

Cottages4you had a few hypotheses to test:  

• reducing the amount of text on the page
• shortening the explanation points for each section
• moving the form elements above the fold
• changing the travel agent log in section

Cottages4you tested a number of variations of the new checkout introduction page over a 3 week period until one variation begun to out perform the others.  Below you can see the winning page.

This new page increased the number of visitors continuing to the next page in the checkout process from 60% to 73%.  This is a 21% click-through improvement from the new page (below) compared to the original variation (above).

After:

 What can you do next?

1. Use Google Analytics to identify areas of your website that could benefit from testing
2. Decide on some hypotheses you’d like to test and then create some alternative pages to the original
3. Looking for testing ideas? Check out these previous posts from Gavin: Improve web-forms and Is your website easy to buy from?
4. Use Website Optimiser to run new page variations concurrently until one begins to perform better than the rest
5. Implement the best performing page and continue testing on other areas of your website

Have you had an analysis and testing success story you’d like to share on the Conversion Room? Let us know, send us an email or leave a comment below. 

Posted by Clancy Childs, Google Analytics team.

Despite the travel havoc caused by the volcano in Iceland, today we hosted our first Google Analytics User Conference in Europe. Six of our Dutch partners joined forces to deliver an interactive and informative day for hundreds of our Dutch users.

Clancy Childs (Google Analytics EMEA Lead Sales Engineer) discussed business intelligence, traffic improvements, conversion optimization and the Google Analytics API.

Brian Clifton also joined the list of speakers to cover ‘Measuring success in a Web 2.0 world’

We had a further 12 workshop sessions hosted by experts from each of the partners including (to name a few):

• Developing a conversion attribution model using Google Analytics
• Creating targeted dashboards
• Landing Page Optimization
• AdWords Optimization

It was really great to meet some of our enthusiastic Dutch Google Analytics users and we look forward to rolling out more of these User Conferences across the world. Copenhagen is next on the list! Stay tuned to the Conversion Room for details of upcoming conferences in Europe.

Well done to ClickValue, Traffic Builders, OrangeValley, Traffic4u, Netsociety and Netprofiler for hosting a great day!

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team

Google Ad Innovations is a brand new website where you can find out about newly released ad technologies and cool features that are currently in beta testing. Here you can watch videos about these new features and then try them out in your account.

As well as containing information about Google Analytics, you will also find details on new AdWords opportunities in the Display, Search and Mobile space.

Here is a taster of what you can find on Google Ad Innovations:

Display: Remarketing

Allows you to show your ads to visitors who have already visited your website while they are browsing websites in the Google Content Network. Learn more.

Mobile: Click to Call Extensions

Allows potential customers who see your ad on their mobile devices with full browsers to call your business directly.  Learn more.

There are lots more new features to read about at the Ad Innovations site. Bookmark the page and visit regularly to ensure you are making the most out of your Google advertising and analysis tools.

Posted by Evelyn O’Keeffe, Google Analytics Team.

Over the years we’ve worked hard to make complex data easy to access and easy to understand. We’ve released features like Advanced Segmentation, which lets you segment your traffic on the fly, Custom Reporting—the ability to create and share your own reports—and Analytics Intelligence, an algorithmic intelligence engine that automatically spots important changes in traffic. All of this work was done with the belief that you needed this data in order to make sense of your website traffic.

We’re big believers that data trumps opinion, so we set out to prove our belief. We’ll be the first to admit that we were wrong. After extensive analysis by our quantitative teams, we’ve uncovered that hits (or How Interneters Track Success) is the only metric that actually matters in web analytics. Forget that business about absolute unique visitors, goal completion rate or even bounce rate. If you want to achieve success, you need to focus on hits.

With this finding, we’ve gone back to the drawing board with the Google Analytics interface. Since this will be a major change, we want to share with you a preview of the new Google Analytics UI:

To help you make this transition, Avinash Kaushik is releasing a new book: Web Analytics 3.0 - The Greatest Hits. The new book (more of a thick brochure, really) is chock full of nearly 1,000 words on how to use hits to track your success. It’s your chance to learn how to hit from a true analytics ninja. Plus it’s much shorter than most of his blog posts.

We’re looking forward to exploring the next stage of web analytics with you. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a hit counter to watch.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Google Analytics Team & Hits Master