How to make more money out of your website
You may have great SEO results and also good PPC campaigns sending lots of visitors to your website. Your website could be ranking highly for main keywords in search engines and you could be getting a lot of potential new clients and traffic to your website via paid campaigns as well, but it is all for nil unless you know how to optimize your main conversion pages so the highest possible percentage of visitors to your website sign up or purchase. The reason that your website exists is to make you more money and if this is your case, here is how you do that:
I suggest you use the Google Website Optimizer. It is a free tool from Google and it allows you as the webmaster to use this split testing software which provides a powerful technique to optimize the main pages in your website so as to allow the maximum number of visitors to your website, purchase, sign up, or do whatever else you want them to do so as to help you make money out of your website.
So what is Split testing and how is it used to help you make the most money out of your website?
Split testing is pretty much what it sounds like: You make a split in your website and test each option of the split on visitors to your website.
If you had two possible headlines for your web page and you couldn’t decide which to use, you could run an A/B split test. That means that half of the visitors to your website would be shown Headline 1and the other half of your visitors would be shown Headline 2. The next step would be to total which headline brought you the most orders and then use THAT headline on your web page from that day forward, knowing that you are using the best converting (“selling“) headline.
Google Website Optimizer lets you carry out tests like this and it’s a free tool! However, tests like this often take several weeks to finish as you gather all the data from different tests. Google itself suggests you get data of around 1,000 visits before making any decisions and changing your website. That could be an easy sample to attain for some websites, but other low traffic volume websites could take a few weeks to reach this threshold for a specific web page being tested.
Split testing software provides a powerful technique for increasing your website’s conversion rate (that is your website’s ability to turn website visitors into new customers).
To get the Google Website Optimizer tool you can click here. http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
How to get an account?
- Sign into your Google account (or create one)
- Ensure you have a Google Analytics account (or create one). You must have one to use the Google Website Optimizer.
- Register on the link above to get a Google Website Optimizer account.
Now you are ready to start split testing!
What to test?
You can test things such as:
- Text on page,
- Images,
- Prices,
- Offers,
- Call to action buttons, etc.—and even all at the same time.
Each one of your visitors will see a different combination of these elements above. After you gain enough data then Google Website Optimizer will calculate, on average, which of the elements performed the best. This can help you to put together a high performing page that converts the optimum number of visitors possible. The idea of making a visitor to your website “convert” or improving a “conversion rate”, is increasing the percentage of your visitors that end up reaching a given goal during a specific period of time while on your website.
This type of testing is called “multivariate testing” which means that you are testing many different variables or variations of a page at the same time as opposed to A/B split testing which was discussed with the headline example at the start of this article.
What kind of split testing should you do?
Multivariate testing –Is when you test all the elements of the page at once.
A/B split tests – When you do one test for example on one image compared to another and see how that affects conversion rates.
I truly hope that this free tool and explanation has ignited your imagination of what the possibilities are with your own website. As with most Google tools, it is easy to use and very user friendly with lots of help forums supporting the software. In the end, every successful change you make, should help you in your ultimate goal to make more money out of the current traffic to your website by converting a higher percentage of visitors successfully.