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05.22.07
Conversion Rate Optimization: Google Takes The Leading Role
 By Frederick Townes
Within the e-commerce sphere, the "mind games" between site owners and search engine designers have focused on search engine optimization (SEO).
After all, you can't make a sale if visitors aren't reaching your site. However, as the web marketplace grows exponentially more competitive, attention among webmasters and site owners has turned to conversion optimization - converting site visitors to buyers.
Conversion optimization has nothing to do with SEO. SEO is designed for spiders and bots. Conversion optimization is based on two factors only: the needs and motivations of human site visitors and persuasive site content and design to encourage humans to make a purchase or perform some other action. Any other considerations are sub-sets of these two factors in conversion optimization strategies.
Measuring Human Motivations and Site Effectiveness
SEO is based on the development of numbers (metrics) that are immutable. Numbers are numbers, there's no debating that. The interpretation of site metrics, on the other hand, is a true combination of art, science and testing.
Assessing conversion rate optimization must apply a completely different approach to data gathering and the accurate, actionable assessment of the cold hard facts (percentages and such) that are the basis of SEO.
The Google Website Optimizer (GWO)
Google owns SEO (sorry Yahoo). It is now moving into eyeball optimization (EBO) to help site owners improve conversion rates. It's got lots of features, it's totally flexible in designing useful tests for human reactions and it provides data using simple to read and understand charts showing what's working and what would work even better.
One key point here: after indexing billions and billions of web pages, who is going to know better what works and doesn't work for solid EBO? After all, all the Google gurus have to do is evaluate their top performing sites to develop measurement criteria and tools to improve conversion optimization. Google is going to know what works.
One other point worth mentioning - it's free. A flexible,
user-designed test engine developed by Google and available free. It's a must have for any site owner, site designer, webmaster or SEO.
What Can Google Website Optimizer Do For Me & How Can It Do It If I Don't Know the Difference Between a Statistical Mean and a Statistical Average?
Multi-Variable Testing
Got to have it. When quantifying human motivations and the effectiveness of a site page, you must have data to compare - data based on site variables such as a different home page image or revised site text. There are hundreds of variables within any website. Color selections, type font, type color, navigation tools, product images and descriptions - literally an endless list of variables.
Google's Website Optimizer allows you to design tests to compare variables to see which ones work best. Often called A/B split tests, these simply compare a change or two to see which performs best. For example, you might have a picture of your product on test site A and a photo of the product in use by a human on test site B. Simply by comparing visitors' reactions to pages A and B, you can make refinements to your site.
Another useful A/B split test to check the success of your Adwords placements is to create two identical ads with two different destination URLs. You'll quickly discover which placements pay for themselves and which should be dropped.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Frederick Townes is the owner of W3 EDGE Web Design. W3 EDGE specializes in custom web design solutions that are built to convert your traffic into conversions. For more information you can view their portfolio or read more of Frederick’s web design articles.
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