On the Spot with WebShare: Three Questions with Google Website Optimizer Product Manager Tom Leung

by David Booth
Founding Partner at WebShare, LLC

In the world of Ecommerce, those of us who have been involved in conversion marketing and statistical testing know just how big an impact even the smallest of details can make to website performance and the bottom line. Some buttons just work better than others. Some product images provoke more purchases time and time again. Some colors are more likely to cause newsletter signups than others, and even details like punctuation and capitalization can have an effect on the rate at which your site converts visitors into monetized customers.

For some time now, the timeliness, breadth and depth of analytic data available about an array of usage metrics for websites has created a statistician’s dream – the capability to test virtually any aspect of a website and observe its relationship on conversions, time spent on a website, or any other measurable aspect of the visitor’s experience. Well, thanks to tools like Google’s Website Optimizer, you don’t have to be a statistician to reap the benefits of statistical conversion testing and ensure that you’re constantly improving the performance of your online activities.

We caught up with Google’s Website Optimizer Product Manager Tom Leung to talk about the new set of Website Optimizer features that was released yesterday, and here’s what he had to say:

A good conversion marketing strategy includes consistent experimentation of every aspect of your website. With tools like Google’s Website Optimizer available, it’s now easier than ever to set up tests and find out what aspects of your website can be changed to improve your bottom line. If you’re not converting at 100%, then you should have a test running!

In a recent post from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur have shed some light on a few questions that are likely close to many web developer’s hearts.

1. The relationships between search results served to varying geographies, the geographic location of a website’s server, IP addresses and domain extensions are playing a part in which sites top the lists of search results pages.

Domain extensions can tell you something about a site before the first glimpse of a page actually loads. If you’re running a website in Australia and targeting Australian customers, then the .com.au extension will likely help you in Australian search results pages. “Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance,” states Shashi Thakur in the post. Additionally, IP addresses can be used to determine geographic location, and Google is not ignoring this information. Be smart about who your target audience is and where they’re located - you can use this information to your advantage.

2. What effects can be expected from cross linking a number of websites that you control, and what guidelines are there for linking strategies if you own and maintain multiple websites?

Shashi weighs in on this issue in a manner that is very consistent with any other linking guidelines that we’ve seen from Google – no surprises here. As with any other linking strategy, the general advice is that links between sites that “provide value” to a user are good, and links that are there simply for the sake of linking are bad. The interesting piece here is the explicit mention of links between topically or thematically related sites: “If the sites are related in business …then it could make sense — the links are organic and useful.”

This advice can be applied to any links, whether between two sites that you own or otherwise. The importance of links to your rankings cannot be understated, and making sure that your limited time and resources are applied to linkbuilding strategies in the most efficient manner is essential.

3. What suggestions are there to helping search engines “comprehend” websites that use DHTML, AJAX, Flash and other Web 2.0 technologies?

Greg Grothaus in his post reaffirms our belief that search engines are not human, and not yet capable of human comprehension. As human visitors to a website, we can look at a photo of a car, and in a fraction of a second draw the conclusion that we are looking at a car. We can watch animations and video and make sense of what we’re seeing. Search engine spiders, on the other hand, can “see” only a mess of pixels and compiled code that does not assist in comprehending what the images or animations are about. For this reason, when designing websites and pages, one must be conscious of the balance between what a search engine sees and a human user will see.

Google officially recommends using Flash “only where it is needed,” and warns of the dangerous ground you enter when your website displays different content to a search engine spider than it would to a human visitor. Without malicious intent, it would make sense to find a way to tell a visitor that does not have Flash installed (or a search engine spider) what they’re missing in a non-Flash manner. Techniques such as cloaking, doorway pages, scripted redirects, and the use of CSS to hide text CAN be used to accomplish this, but as these are the same techniques that are commonly abused in hopes of manipulating a search engine, using these on your site is begging to be penalized.

In a separate post, Mark Berghausen of Google’s Search Quality Team writes “the only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users.” We’d heed that warning.

Take a look at the following two sets of text, and as you read them try to gauge which you think would be more likely in converting a website visitor into a website customer:

1) “Have you been looking for the perfect blue widget to outfit your home or office? Then you’ve come to the right place at bluewidgets.com. We have lots of blue widgets in stock and you’re sure to find the right one for your needs.”

2) “Are you searching for absolute perfection in blue widgets for your residence or business? Let us cater to your widget requirements and provide all that you ardently desire. We maintain a full selection of blue widgets for your perusal.”

What do you think? Does the second version sound much more sophisticated? Does the first version describe a product that would fit your needs? Well, as Bill Nye the Science Guy says, “one test is worth one thousand expert opinions” – and THAT is conversion marketing.

The major differences between the two sales copy versions is the reading level that they represent. According to the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level calculation, the first version is written at a 5^th grade reading level, and the second at a 9^th grade level. The way to find out which is better at selling product is to set up structured tests and measure the results. In this example, a set of standard A/B split tests could be used to measure the effect of reading level alone on different variations of sales copy.

Well, here’s the result:

When we pit sales copy at the 5^th grade level against copy written at a high school level in conversion tests, we find that - almost without exception - the 5^th grade copy will get more visitors to purchase the product that’s being described.

Why is this? Well, it’s not because your potential customers are all 5^th graders, or because all of your potential customers read at a 5^th grade level. The truth is that they’re not dumb, they’re just in a hurry! You have less than 8 seconds to convince a website visitor to stay once they’ve hit a page of your website, and 5^th grade level reading material is just plain faster to digest. A visitor can absorb the information much more quickly, and in a day and age where 1,000 more results are just a Back button click away, no one wants to read a white paper when they first hit your site.

So what other action items can we take from this result? We have another hypothesis to test: the more information a user can absorb in a shorter period of time, the more likely they are to convert. Let’s use the principles of conversion marketing to think of some more tests that could help us increase our conversion rates.

• How about bullet points versus paragraph format product descriptions? We know bullet points are easier to digest!
• How about instructional images (i.e. product demonstrations) instead of standalone product images? Tell the user how the product will meet their needs without writing a word!
• Number of sentences or word count in your product descriptions, use of whitespace, location of pertinent information, the list goes on and on.

These variables can be tested one version against the other in A/B split testing or page version testing, or you could even measure interaction effects by designing and running a multivariate experiment.