Small changes can make a big difference to your business' bottom line. One business saw a 21% increase in performance by switching the color of a button from green to red based on data from 2,000 page visits. That’s an amazing change!
Google Optimize is a great tool to help you determine what simple changes can improve your digital marketing. Here at Prodigitude, we've found Google Optimize to be an incredible A/B testing tool that's easy to use and implement while generating valuable information our customers can use to improve sales, increase traffic, enhance open rates, generate more clicks, and get more responses.
What is Google Optimize?
Google Optimize is an online tool from Google that integrates with your website and allows you to experiment with different ways of delivering your content with something called A/B testing.
Here are four ways Google Optimize can improve your digital presence:
- Build off your data. Identify your visitors wants and needs based on their behavior and keyword searches. Google Optimize easily integrates with other Google tools, like Analytics, so you can quickly understand how your website can be improved.
- Run A/B testing easily. Test a variety of components on your website to learn what works best for your visitors, including copy, layout, color, images, and more.
- Customize for a compelling experience. One size rarely fits all. When it comes to digital, you have the luxury of customizing your website experience to appeal to various types of audiences.
- Grow your business. Convert more visitors into customers with personalized buyer journeys on your Google Ad landing pages.
What is A/B Testing?
Let’s just take a minute to define what we mean by A/B testing. Sometimes referred to as split testing, A/B testing is a way to compare elements on a webpage to determine which performs better in terms of page views, time on page, conversions, bounce rate, clicks and more. Basically, we create two pages and see which one performs better. Then we continue building out better pages to further optimize conversion rates.
There are different types of A/B testing, but the most common is a 50-50 split, sending 50% of your traffic to page A and 50% of your traffic to page B.
A/B testing can help you determine what helps or hinders sales. Remember the call-to-action (CTA) button example above? If such a minor change like a different color CTA button can get people to click, it’s important to know what other elements on your page might have an impact.
Know what works with A/B
Testing When you run A/B tests, you can determine what works specifically for your audience and demographics.
We’re huge proponents of A/B testing. While educating yourself on marketing best practices and industry trends is valuable, A/B testing allows you to focus directly on your audience, which is unique to your business. These trends and best practices may or may not work for them. A/B testing lets you know for certain.
Our top 5 A/B Tests While you can test a variety of elements, here’s our list of what we recommend testing to get the most valuable input:
- Headlines. Your headline should be engaging and actionable, while at the same time, incorporating keywords. Test different versions to see which one gets better results. For example, changing a signup headline to highlight how quick signing up was garnered a 30 percent increase in click-through rates for one software company.
- CTA buttons. As mentioned earlier, just changing the color can make a huge improvement. You can also test the placement, size, or verbiage. Just make sure you test one change at a time. Introducing too many variables will make it difficult to determine which is actually having an impact.
- Product descriptions. Do they make sense to your visitors? Test a few different descriptions while keeping all the important details intact.
- Testimonials. While you obviously can’t test variations of the copy, you can test the placement, size, and fonts. It’s a great way to make sure they appear in the right place to attract and convert your visitors.
- Images, audio, and video. We recommend creating vlogs, videos, infographics, and other visually appealing content. If you have a library of videos, one good idea is to A/B test video testimonials against written ones or short infographics against longer versions. Even stock images can impact your A/B testing.
How to get started with Optimize
While implementing Google Optimize is a fairly easy process, knowing what to test, how often, analyzing the results, and implementing the appropriate changes can be a bit daunting for some businesses. That's where Prodigitude excels. Here's how we can help.
- Deciding what to test
We’ll help you determine what’s relevant to test to impact the metric you want to improve. For example, to generate more organic traffic, we might focus on an element that impacts organic SEO like keywords. For conversion rate optimization, we might begin with the headline, a video, or a CTA. - Identify and set goals
We’ll work with you to determine what you want to achieve with your A/B test, focusing on a single metric at first. By concentrating on one element at a time, we’ll get cleaner data to make bigger impacts. - Analyze the data.
We’ll look at your existing data to determine a starting point or baseline. We’ll look for a change that will move the needle in a positive direction. - Select the page to test.
We’ll help you determine your most important page or a highly trafficked landing page that significantly impacts your business's bottom line. - Select the elements to test. With your input, we’ll choose which elements to A/B test and in what order, starting with the elements we think are most likely to influence the target metric, changing a single variant.
- Accumulate data and analyst data.
We’ll gather and analyze your data to draw conclusions based on which variation won. Once we better understand which version your audience liked better — and by what margin — we can make adjustments and continue to improve the performance of your digital marketing tools.
Google Optimize is an excellent tool, in our opinion. It's easy to use and can provide great insight into how to improve your digital tools to get the best results. Want to know more? Prodigitude marketing elevated services can help your business grow. Chat with us now!