Did you hear the news? On August 1st, 2012, you will be able to use Google’s latest product, the all new Google Analytics Content Experiments. You may be wondering why you should care. Well, if you have invested any money into the development of a website, SEO, Social Media Marketing, or Paid Search Marketing, you want to make sure your investment was not in vain. The Content Experiments tool will help to increase the probability of conversions that result in more sales from your website. After all, isn’t increasing revenue the reason you made the initial investment?
Content Experiments will perform the function of A/B testing on websites, entire pages, isolated content, headlines or even specific images. This new tool will be tied directly to your analytics and consider all website traffic as opposed to Google Website Optimizer that only considers Adwords website traffic.
Throughout the remainder of this year, Google Website Optimizer will slowly be eliminated and replaced fully by these new Content Experiments. If you are planning on starting any in the near future, you might want to consider hold off for a bit and perform your testing in Content Experiments rather than Google Website Optimizer.
According to Google, the new tool will be really simple to use and make A/B testing a function that everyone can do. However, just because it’s easy enough to do, doesn’t mean that everyone has the time or even that everyone has the in depth knowledge of consumer behavior needed to know what items to test and what to test them against. If either of these situations sound familiar to you, don’t worry; there are many professional digital marketing companies you can work with to help you ensure your website and advertising are performing at an optimal level.
There are a number of benefits to the new system and reasons for you to get really excited about Content Experiments. One of the biggest benefits is that it ties into Google Analytics. This means that there is only one code snippet you need to include on the page rather than multiple pages of code. It really simplifies that aspect when you need to add new testing. You can also now use advanced segments to segment your results too. As mentioned earlier, all website traffic will be analyzed.
There are some improved statistical models too. Test results don’t even show up for 2 weeks or more, and all tests expire after 3 months, assuming you can’t get a statistically significant winner. If you have a lot of traffic that’ll undoubtedly be true, but it’ll make it harder to do longer tests on lower traffic sites.
The one thing it does not do is multivariate testing.
But, overall, I think it’s a great tool. Have fun with it and be prosperous.
