You want your ads to be successful. To measure that success, you use click and conversion tracking to gain insight into user behavior on your pages. If users are reaching your pages, but you aren't getting the conversion results you want, what do you do? It's time to make improvements to your site. Website Optimizer can help.
Website Optimizer allows you to test changes in the website content of your pages in order to determine what will be most effective in getting conversions. You choose what parts of a page you'd like to test -- headline, image, promo text - and we'll run an experiment on a portion of your site traffic to determine which content on your site users respond to best. When we've collected enough data, we'll provide you with reliable reports and a suggested course of action in order to optimize your site for maximum business results.
Before performing an experiment, take some time to consider which aspects of your page you'd like to test and how; the more thought you put into the experiment, the more valuable results you'll get out of it. The Quick Start Guide will give you a good idea of what steps you'll need to take to prepare for your experiment.
To run the experiment, you'll also need the assistance of your webmaster or site administrator, who will implement the experiment code on your site that will enable Website Optimizer to vary your traffic to the different versions of your page. You or your webmaster might find it helpful to review our Technical Overview as well.
For a full walk-through of the benefits and use of Website Optimizer, view our Demo.
| Example report | Back to Top |
There are two kinds of reports: a combination report and a page section report. Each of the columns in those reports provides a different insight into the performance of combinations, page sections and variations.
Combination report
A combination report will show the performance results for all of the page combinations made from the page section variations you created for your experiment. By seeing how well a particular combination performs in comparison with the original and the other combinations, you can choose the most successful one to improve your business.
Estimated conversion rate range provides the most immediate insight into overall performance. You'll view this column to see how well each combination is performing relative to your original content. If you're a numbers type, you can view the numerical range to the left, but we've visually displayed the performance in the bars to the right: bars that veer toward the left and are colored in red aren't performing as well as your original content, while bars that veer toward the right and are partially green are performing better than your original content.
The chance to beat original column shows the likelihood, expressed as a probability, that a particular combination will be more successful than your original content. It is very possible that there can be more than one combination which has a good chance to beat the original. When this number goes above 95% or below 5%, the corresponding bar will be all green or all red, respectively.
Observed improvement displays the percent improvement over the original combination. Because this percentage is a ratio of the conversion rate of a combination to the conversion rate of the original column, it will often vary widely. We suggest that you only concentrate on the observed improvement when a large amount of data has been collected and it can be considered more reliable.
Conversions/impressions is just that -- the raw data of how many conversions and page views a particular combination generated.
Page section report
In contrast to the combination report, which relates to your content performance as whole combinations, the page section report focuses on which variations to each page section performed best. Keep in mind that simply picking the best-performing variations for each page section may not be as effective as picking a winning combination, since there may be interactions among variations that the page section report does not capture.
Relevance rating shows how much impact a particular page section has on your experiment. For example, if your headline page section showed a relevance rating of 0, you'd know that the headlines you used did not significantly distinguish themselves. Alternatively, a relevance rating of 5 for your image page section would show that there were one or more images which significantly differentiated themselves from the others, and that the images page section is important for conversions.
The other page section columns can be interpreted in the exact same manner as they appear in the combinations report, with the caveat that they're only meaningful among the variations of a single page section and only provide insight into how a variation performs relative to the original variation in that section.
