On 1st June 2012, Google announced that it would retire Google website optimizer (GWO) on Aug 1st 2012. GWO was a free website optimization tool that allowed webmasters to improve conversion rate and user experience.
Google Analytics Content Experiments has replaced Google website optimizer. Here are some difference between Google Website Optimizer and GA Content Experiments
1) Google Website Optimizer required different codes in Control, Experiment and Conversion Pages. If you have Google Analytics already set up in your website (most websites already have Google Analytics code set up), GA Content Experiments are ready to go with just one code for the original page.
2) GA Content Experiments allows only A/B Tests, while Google website optimizer allowed both A/B tests and Multivariate tests. Google has marketed the product as an A/B/N testing tool (multiple versions of the page) but most website optimization tools in the market by default uses A/B/N. Also, GA Content Experiments only allows 5 versions of the same page.
Note: A/B tests allows webmasters to tests two to multiple versions of a page, while multivariate tests allows webmasters to simultaneously test multiple elements of a page – headline, fonts, call to actions, product description, image, reviews etc.
3) You don’t need any separate interface for running A/B tests. Content Experiments are part of Google Analytics. Check out Content -> Experiments like shown below:
How to run your first Content Experiment
1) Click Experiments
2) Click Create Experiments Button
3) Enter the URL of the page that you have selected for the Experiment
.jpg)
Before you select the page, here are some guidelines:
a) Pick a page that has a considerable number of visitors. Not all websites can claim 1000s of visitors per page but pick a comparatively popular page from your website.
b) Pick the most important element of the page that impacts conversion like headline, call to action button and copy. If Headline is the most important element, create 5 headline versions
4) Next step is to choose experiment pages.
5) You can add upto 5 variations
6) After you have selected the experiment pages, click ‘Next Step’
7) Now you can set Experiment Options
a) First, select Experiment Objective Metric
You can either choose existing goals or add new goals as part of the Experiment metric.
b) Next, select the percentage of visitors for the experiment and Click ‘Next Step’
.jpg)
c) Now you can either add the experiment code, yourself or email the code to your webmaster.
d) If you are adding the code, copy the code and add it to the head section of the page. You don’t have to add any code for the variation pages.
e) Once you have added the code, review the experiment.
You have just created your first experiment using Google Analytics Content Experiments. If you have any questions about setting up content experiments, comment below or contact us.