Ever want to try improving the conversion rate of your blog, but didn't have the money to hire a designer, the time to figure it all out, or technical prowess to pull it off?
Well, I’m happy to say those excuses are no longer valid ever since the Google Experiments feature was integrated into Google Analytics.
If you’re not familiar with Google Experiments Lab already, it’s a program that allows you to serve different variations of your blog to different website visitors and measure the performance of those page variations against your goals (more email opt-ins, lower bounce rates) to see which version performs the best. Let me explain in simpler terms with a hypothetical example on how to setup Google Experiments.
Let’s say that our host, Ms. Ileane, wanted to run a Google Experiment to see if she could get a higher percentage of visitors to sign up for her email list.
(Side note: I’m a subscriber myself and highly recommend joining the community.) One simple experiment that she could try is to change the call-to action located on her intake form to the right:
Instead of the benefit description above Ms. Ileane could have half of her visitors see a different benefit statement like: Sign Up to Learn How Ms. Ileane Gets Over 40,000 Visitors Per Month To Her Blog.
After running a Google Analytics A/B Testing experiment for week or so, Ms. Ileane would be able to see which version of the intake form resulted in a higher percentage of email opt-ins and stick with the winner.
Running experiments like this can be quite lucrative for a blogger since the more visitors you’re able to convert into subscribers to your email list the more money you’ll generally make. And since Google Experiments makes it so easy to get started designing a blog experiment, why wouldn’t you give it a try?
The remainder of this article will walk-you step-by-step on how to set up your first Google Experiment. So grab a cup of coffee, follow the instructions below, and you could be launching your very own test in under 2 hours.
How to Setup Google Experiments for Your Blog
Step 1: If you already use Google Analytics (GA) to monitor the performance of your blog, you’re ahead of the game in terms of getting started already. If you don’t you’ll need to sign up for a free account and install the GA code to your blog first.
Here is a straight-forward guide to getting you setup with Google Analytics for WordPress.
Step 2: After you’ve got GA installed on your blog, sign into your account here: www.google.com/analytics/
Step 3: After you’ve logged into your account look through the options on the left-side navigation and select the “Experiments” button located underneath the “Content” section as demonstrated below:
Step 4: Next, you will select the “Create Experiment” button on the page titled All Experiments.
Step 5: Now it’s time to select the URL that you’d like to run an experiment on. For the majority of bloggers, the homepage of your blog is a good place to start testing since that’s usually the most visited page. However, for my own test I want to set up a test on the landing page that outlines the benefit of subscribing to my e-mail list here: http://www.500amonth.com/my-business/.
Enter the specific URL you’d like to begin testing and click the start experimenting button as demonstrated below:
Step 6: Choosing Your Experiment Pages
First pick a name for your experiment. This is for your own reference only. Make it’s something you can easily remember and move on.
Next, the Original Page fields will already be filled. You will also need at least one variation of your original web page to be able to conduct a test a displaying a different page elements (like a new headline, different call-to action, or switching up the images) to your visitors.
If you’re using WordPress and need a Variation Page created quickly and easily, I recommend installing the Duplicate Post plugin. The duplicate post plug-in will create and exact copy of your blog posts or pages within WordPress allowing you to quickly and safely make changes to a variation or test page.
After you've created a variation page and picked something on the page that you want to test, enter the URL into the Variation 1 field as shown below and click the “Save & Next” button to move on to the next step.
In case you’re wondering, I decided to test adding some different headlines for my experiment that reference some different benefits of being a subscriber. I’m interested in finding out what kind of information people really want to learn by subscribing to my list. This is a quick, easy, and potentially lucrative test that any blogger can setup.
Step 7: Set Experiment Options
With this step you will be setting up the objective or goal of your experiment. Google Experiments allows you to setup for types of goals: URL Destination, Visit Duration, Page/Visit, or Events. Each of these goals is explained in detail here.
You select the goal of your experiment using the “Select a Metric” drop down menu shown below.
Next, select what percentage of your visitors should be included in this test.
Tip: The larger percentage of your visitors you select the faster you’ll be able to find a “winner” for your experiment. However, if you’re already getting a lot of opt-ins to your blog, you might want to scale this number back so that you don’t lose out on potential subscribers.
Finally, click the “Save & Next” button to move on to the next stage. Good news, you’re almost done setting up your first test!
Step 8: Next, you’ll need to upload a small piece of code into the section of the Original page and Variation page you created. This code is necessary to get your experiment to work.
After you get the script added to both your pages click the “Save & Next” button at the bottom of the page to wrap up the setup process.
At this step Google will automatically run a test to validate if the above experiment code has been implemented correctly. Now, all you've got to do is sit back and wait for the result of your first test to come in. Pat yourself on the back, you're doing something that many bloggers write about but rarely get around to actually doing for their own blog.
Google Experiments: Conclusion
If you’re looking for a simple, fast, and free way to begin experimenting with conversion on your blog, Google Experiments is definitely the way to go. My advice when running your first test is to try out something that’s easy for you to edit on your website, like changing the headline of your email intake form. This will give you the confidence to run more ambitious tests in the future without getting overwhelmed by conducting these experiments.
What do you think about doing some A/B Testing on your blog with Google Content Experiments?