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Marketers figuring out how best to optimize their website content and design in order to bring more customers to their site or to drive better sales now have more help from Google.
In March this year the company rolled out a tool called Optimize that lets marketers experiment with and test the impact of changes to their website content and design. The tool for instance allows site owners to quickly test different versions of a landing page to figure out which version results in the most sales conversions, subscription sign-ups or other completed activities.
Optimize is a free version of Optimize 360, an enterprise grade A/B testing and website personalization product that Google launched in 2016. The free version, according to Google, offers many of the same features as the commercial version. It is targeted largely at small and medium businesses that can benefit from a tool for testing website usability but do not have the budget for it, Google has said.
This week Google added two new features to the free version that the company says will give marketers even more flexibility in such testing and experimenting.
One of the new features is designed to give marketers a way to change and test the web pages that people land on when they click on a particular ad. The goal is to enable organizations to optimize landing pages for their ads so potential customers are more inclined to follow through and actually make a purchase.
For instance, a website selling flowers might want to test how users would react to different landing pages for the keyword “holiday bouquet” Google product managers Rotimi Iziduh and Mary Pishny explained in a blog Oct. 26.
One landing page could feature a banner that advertises a 20 percent savings on holiday bouquets while another could feature a photo of a holiday dinner table centerpiece. Optimize will allow the site owners to quickly measure user response to both landing pages and determine which one performs better.
The new feature is the result of an integration that Google announced in May between Optimize and the company’s Adwords web advertising platform. At the time, Google had described the integration as giving marketers a faster way to create and test landing pages for specific ad keywords, ad group and campaigns.
The second feature that Google added to its Optimize tool is designed to make it easier for site owners to conduct experiments for meeting customer objectives. For example, the feature makes it easier for site owners to track specific user actions, like playing a video or downloading a file, on different versions of a web page.
“It’s always good to put more options and control into the hands of our users,” Iziduh and Pishny wrote in their blog. “Testing and experimenting is one way to better understand and improve customer journeys.”