Google and WebShare’s David Booth are teaming up to offer a free webinar on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 10:00 am (PDT):
Planning and Running your First Website Optimizer Experiment.

Sign up for this webinar!

This 90 minute webinar is targeted at anyone who’s ready to get started with A/B and Multivariate testing using Google’s free Website Optimizer tool.  The topics we’ll cover are based on trainings we’ve delivered at Google offices across the country and as part of the live Google Seminars for Success training series that continues to hit cities across North America.  Join us for this live webinar and learn:

• Landing page testing basics – what is it?
• Identifying test pages and planning for your first experiment
• How to set up and run A/B and Multivariate tests
• Live demos of both A/B and MVT experiments
• Reading the reports and understanding the test results

There will be 30 minutes of questions and answers with Google’s Trevor Claiborne and Andrew Gomez.

Hope to see you there!

Let’s say I have a goal of an e-commerce sale, but, the final step of the sale happens on another website.  I have all my products on my online store, and I host my own shopping cart.  Once it’s time to take the credit card, however, I’ve chosen to let someone else handle it, and the visitor is sent on over to a third party payment gateway.

For anyone that wants to run some experiments using the A/B test in Google’s Website Optimizer, and has the test and conversion pages on different top level domains, you might be a bit frustrated that at this point it’s not an easy task.

While you always have the option of using the Multivariate test to emulate an A/B test across domains with some minor code tweaks, sometimes we just want the ease of Website Optimizer’s A/B option.  Here’s a quick little workaround that may work for you – you just have to be willing to make the sacrifice of abstracting your conversion just a bit. 

Even if I could put the goal conversion code on the third party’s thank you page, I won’t see any conversions show up in my Website Optimizer A/B test, because I’ve crossed domains and the cookie that’s used to track me didn’t follow me.  So what to do?

I can abstract my conversion a step or two back to the pages that are on my domain, but I have to make (and be comfortable with) the assumption that if one of my landing page versions was more likely to get someone into the checkout process, it would also be more likely to get someone to actually go through the checkout process and make a purchase.

So rather than put the goal conversion code on the actual thank you page over on the third party domain, I’m going to call the goal conversion code just before I send the user from my domain over to the third party.

If my shopping cart looks like this:

Then the last thing that happens on my domain is a click on that checkout button.  So I just tell Website Optimizer that if that button gets clicked, go ahead and count a conversion.

The code for that particular button might look something like this:

<INPUT TYPE="IMAGE" SRC="checkout.gif">

In order to count a conversion when that button gets clicked, I need to:

1) Add one JavaScript function in my checkout page’s code that looks like this:

<script>
function ConversionCount()
{

_uacct = 'UA-XXXXXXX-Y';
urchinTracker("/ZZZZZZZZZZ/goal");
return true;

}
</script>

Note that you’ll need to change the X’s, Y’s, and Z’s above to the actual numbers used in your experiment.

2) Call that function in an onClick event.  To do this, just change that button’s code slightly:

<INPUT TYPE="IMAGE" SRC="checkout.gif" onClick="return ConversionCount();">

Alternatively, you could do this using the onSubmit event of your form:

<FORM ACTION=”http://www.thirdpartycart.com/checkout” METHOD=”post” onSubmit="return ConversionCount();">

Done.  As long as you’re comfortable with the assumptions you’ve made, you’re now getting conversion data for an A/B test setup within Website Optimizer.

There’s another advantage to this approach, in that you’ll likely get more conversions than you would have if you were counting only completed e-commerce transactions.  More data and an inherently higher conversion rate mean your test can take less time to run.  This approach is often nice to use in scenarios where you have very few conversions whether the thank you page is on your domain or not.  So again, as long as you’re comfortable with the assumptions you’re making, you can abstract many tests back a level in order to get more data faster.

Are you using the best tools for your search marketing and conversion marketing programs, and are you using them to the best of your advantage? There are a variety of applications offered by various vendors, however Google leads the pack with three applications in particular: Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer. It may not be perfectly clear as to how the Google applications work together and what the function of each one is. So let’s demystify the situation. Below we highlight a few Google applications, and each one can be used to help you create, manage and implement your search and conversion marketing program. Best of all, these applications are free or are available at very reasonable costs. As an added bonus, these applications are web-based, which means you don’t have to host them on your server.

Information is power, and from that perspective Google Analytics, Google Adwords and Google Website Optimizer together are a nuclear power plant! Together, these three applications can help you answer more than just how many visitors were on you site yesterday. They can help you answer as specific of a question as, “How many visitors from Chicago who speak Spanish clicked on my pay-per-click advertisement and actually converted?” And “Which version of the specific advertisement I showed them was more effective?” Furthermore, the tools can help you use the information from those questions to identify and create tests with your site to further improve your conversion rates. Now, that’s powerful stuff!

Google Analytics houses all of the information collected about your site’s visitors, and allows you to view it in hundreds of different reports. It costs nothing (other than your time) to open a Google Analytics account for your website. Think of Google Analytics as a giant database that allows you to collect loads of data about your site’s visitors, and perform highly specific queries to slice and dice visitor data in just about any way you desire. Google Analytics can be even more powerful when used in conjunction with another Google application (Adwords or Website Optimizer) to help you manage your search and conversion marketing programs. If you’re serious about increasing your site’s traffic and conversion rate, you should be incorporating Google Analytics into just about everything you do.

Google Adwords is Google’s Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program, and its interface allows users to manage the campaigns that drive traffic to Web sites on a cost per click basis. Opening an Adwords account is easy, and only requires $5 and a few minutes. In Adwords, users can implement new PPC campaigns, edit keyword lists, change ads, and manage their PPC budget. Additionally, Adwords gives you access to a number of tools than can give you insights into everything from seasonal trends across industries to keyword research. Adwords also provides a number of reports to view your PPC campaign statistics and progress, and your Adwords account can be linked to Google Analytics to give you even more data about your ads and paid traffic. The data available in Adwords are certainly extremely useful, but any organization serious about improving their search and conversion marketing program should be exploiting the wealth of information that a solid analytics package (like Google Analytics) provides in addition to the Adwords reports.

Google Website Optimizer allows users to conduct statistical tests on their site’s pages to determine which variables will improve the probability that a visitor will convert on the website’s goals. Website Optimizer is free, but as it is accessed through the Adwords interface, it is only available to users who have an Adwords account. So technically Website Optimizer costs you the $5 you need to open an Adwords account. The variables you can test are virtually unlimited – they can range from 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, and anything in between. Website Optimizer offers two statistical analysis methods (A/B split testing and full factorial multivariate testing) to help you design and implement tests that will determine what changes on your site affect the probability of visitors converting on your site’s goals. Website Optimizer uses Analytics-like tracking code to run the tests, and you can use Google Analytics to see the long term trends that result from your Website Optimizer testing. If you’re not converting 100% of your visitors, then you should be testing your website right now.

Still not sure where to begin? WebShare offers consulting and training services to help you make the most of your search and conversion marketing programs. Webshare is one of a handful of companies in the world that is an authorized consultant for Google Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer as well as a certified consultant for a number of other tools including Yahoo! Search Marketing. Without a doubt, Google Analytics, Adwords and Website Optimizer can be intimidating, and they do take time to master. However, if used to their fullest potential these three applications can help you improve your search and conversion marketing programs by leaps and bounds.