Once you have your website analytics package installed, you can start to understand its performance and look for ways to improve it.
A web page consists of several disparate elements, all of which work together to influence your users in ways that are not always intuitive. As a result, the only way to truly test page effectiveness is to change a page and see what happens. This involves:
- Analyse. Analyse your analytics data to look for underperforming areas.
- Hypothesis. Generate a testable hypothesis about your website. For example, if I make the buy now button green, it will increase revenue by 10%.
- Test. Run an A/B test or a multivariate test to test your theory.
Google Optimize
Google Optimize is a free service that allows website owners to test changes in your pages’ website content to figure out what affects conversions. You choose what parts of a page you would like to test, e.g., headline, image, promo text – and run an experiment on a part of your site traffic to decide which content your site users respond to best. Two testing options are A/B and Multivariate tests.
A/B testing
A/B testing is when you present two (or more) versions of a web page to different users. The user specifies the original page they want to test and provides alternative arrangements of that page they want to compare. Google Optimize will split the traffic between the different version of the page, enabling the user to establish which version performs best.
A/B experiments are the simpler version of testing with Google Optimize. If you have low amounts of traffic and want results fast, creating an A/B test may be the right place to start.
Multivariate testing
Multivariate testing allows the testing of multiple variables simultaneously. For example, using multivariate testing, you could select the headline, image and promotional text on a page as your page sections and generate three different versions of each one. When the experiment was running on your page, a user might see Headline A, Image B and Promotional Text C altogether, or Headline B, Image C and Promotional Text A.
