San Jose, Calif., — Today, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, CA; Google has introduced a major update to its Website Optimizer, which it says includes several new features and useful tool for any search engine marketing company that will have users breathing a sigh of relief.
For those new to Website Optimizer, Google’s free content testing and optimization tool, which helps you to test different variations of your site content to determine what will be most effective at getting you the results you want from your site, explains Tom Leung, business product manager for Google Website Optimizer, described the changes today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, CA.
“Using Website Optimizer, businesses or individuals can set up different versions of a Web page and test the performance of each.”
Users can now define different versions of a web page and test the performance of each, but one of the new features is for users to simply click a “disable” button to remove any low-performing variations, with the remaining traffic getting sent to the higher-performing versions.
Website Optimizer’s offering has now expanded to include:
The first new feature known as “Experiment Pruning,” enables users to disable one or more combinations that are poorly functioning or just do not make sense for your campaign in your Website Optimizer experiments.
Hence the remaining traffic would be sent to the high-performing ones. Previously, the process for stopping and starting a new test was a lot more complicate. Pruning is especially helpful in cases where your experiment may have too many combinations relative to the amount of traffic it receives.
Another important change include “A/B Offline Validation,” is now available for your test pages that are not accessible to Website Optimizer. Users can now directly upload a copy of the tagged page and Website Optimizer claims that everything will be tagged properly, wrote Jon Stona from the Google Website Optimizer Team on a Google blog.
Lastly, the new features include more intuitive reporting, which has been enhanced to more clearly indicate which combinations are performing well and which ones are not. Google hopes this will prevent users from false conclusions derived from results or from prematurely ending the campaigns.
To learn more about Web site optimization, check out the Post-Click Optimization panel at SES San Jose on Thursday. Tom will be among the four digital marketing experts on the panel.