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Online A/B Split Test Calculator
Posted by: | CommentsAre you running an A/B split test for a marketing, email, ppc, or direct mail campaigns and want to know if you have a statistically significant winner to go live with? I recently built a quick and easy online A/B split test calculator at www.SplitTestCalculator.com that will answer this exact question for you.
Please make sure that when you fill out the calculator with your test information that you then click on the calculate results button and look below it in the results section to see if you have a winner or not.
If the A/B calculator says that you have a winner, you can determine the winner very easily by just looking at the conversion rates of each of the panels and the one with the better conversion rate is your winner. If the A/B split test calculator results declare that you don’t have a winner then you will need to run your test longer, or run a different test.
You can try out my online A/B split test calculator at www.SplitTestCalculator.com .
Paid Search Success Includes Tight PPC Ad Groups
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Tight PPC Ad Groups A Key Factor in Paid Search Success
When building-out or optimizaing your PPC Ad Groups, whether it is at Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any other PPC engine, one of the unanimous tactics amongst the top PPC professionals is to have what is referred to as “tight” Ad Groups to aid in your paid search success.
An over-simplified understanding of the workings of keywords and ad triggers inside PPC ad groups will help you further understand why it’s important to have a “tight” ad group. First, your ad group contains keywords that trigger and then displays an associated ad from within that ad group when someone searches on a keyword that you’re bidding on. If they click on the ad, they are then taken to your landing page. Your ad is hopefully highly relevant to the keyword or phrase being searched and thus with your excellent PPC ad copy and high relevancy it entices the search engine user to click on your ad and then ideally they convert on your landing page for whatever you page goal is.
Relevancy
Needless to say, the more relevant your display ad copy is, the higher the chance the user will click on it. If you are searching for Hotels in Connecticut, and an ad for a Hotel in California is displayed, the likelihood of you clicking on that ad would be very slim – it’s not what you are looking for and would be even less appealing especially if the other ads on the page are for in fact Hotels in Connecticut. Another scenario is that your ad is somewhat relevant to the search thus enticing people to click on it, but it doesn’t convert well because the landing page associated with the ad (only 1 landing page per ad unless you are testing the landing page via AB or multivariate) isn’t as relevant for certain keywords and therefore costing you for the unproductive click and therefore driving up your costs.
Tight Ad Groups Explained
So what is meant by a “tight” ad group is to have an ad group that contains only keywords that are extremely similar. This enables you to create display ads that are highly targeted for those keywords which will then be shown when someone does a search and the results are displayed. With extremely similar keywords, and highly relevant ads, you are then able to create a highly relevant landing page to both the keywords and the ads ensuring a much higher rate of conversion success due to relevancy all the way through.
If the ad group is not tight, you will either then have generic display ads that appeal to all of the keywords, or ads that are relevant for only some of the keywords and therefore not highly relevant to the others keywords; and the same goes for the landing page your PPC display ad links too. In each of these situations, the performance will be less than desirable.
Managing Tight Ad Groups
Another benefit of tight ad groups is the ability to more easily determine the success or lack of success of individual keywords because you know that the ads and landing pages are more relevant to all of the keywords in that ad group. Or, if the keywords or phrases are not performing well, you can test the ad copy or landing pages and know that the traffic for those terms are similar in the sense that they are searching out similar terms.
In an ad group that isn’t “tight”, it’s harder to determine if it’s the keywords, the ads, or the landing pages underperforming in the sense that testing any of them may reverse performance of others within that ad group – i.e. changing the ad copy in an ad group where the keywords are extremely similar may result in some of the good performing terms to underperform, while the previously underperforming terms start to perform. In reality, many unwanted situations could occur, whereas this is the simplest problematic scenario easily avoided by keeping your ad groups “tight”.
In Conclusion
Don’t be afraid to create lots of ad groups if needed to keep them highly targeted. Sure it’s easier upfront to set-up only a few ad groups and stuff them with lots of keywords so that you only have to manage a few ads and a few landing pages. But in the long run, it’s not so easy or beneficial, their overall performance will suffer (or underperform) and your costs could go up (and very likely your conversions will go down). Not to mention that it makes testing your ads, landing pages, etc. much harder and less reliable.
Interpreting Google Website Optimizer’s Page Sections Report
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle Website Optimizer, the free multivariate and AB testing tool makes available to you two results reports when you are running a multivariate test; the Combinations report, and the Page Sections report. The Combinations report is easy to read and interpret for the most part (for simplicity purposes here, the pages are listed in order of best performance, and a statistically significant winner with a 95+% confidence level over the control will be highlighted in green), but the Page Sections report many people incorrectly use the data that is presented or are confused on what the report is actually providing. You MUST know how to correctly interpret this report; otherwise you could incorrectly make decisions from the data that can cost you potentially big-time down the road.
The Combinations report provides you with the performance data for all of your page combinations that you are testing and compares each page combination to your original page (the control) in order for you to determine what test page combinations are outperforming the original.
The Page Sections report on the other hand displays all of your page sections that you are testing and the elements within each section in order to show you the best performing page element for each particular section.
Here is the scoop on the Page Sections report.
Many times, when you are running a test you will notice that the best performing elements according to the Page Sections report are not the same elements that are present in your winning page combination. It’s not as simple as looking at the different sections and choosing all the “best” elements according to Google Website Optimizer Page Sections report and then rolling out a page that contains these elements. The reason being is that the performance of the elements in each section being tested as shown in the Page Sections report are not being calculated and presented in context with the other sections. By this I mean that the results of each element in each section are presented by how they performed against the other elements in that same page section. It’s not taking into account the context of all the other elements on the page when showing you the best performers. To see which the best elements are in proper context, view your Combinations report and look at the individual elements in your top performing page combination.
Confused?
Let me give you an example. If you are testing a main headline, and have 3 different versions:
- Control/original headline
- Test headline # 1
- Test headline #2
And the report shows that test headline # 1 is the best performing element in that area, it’s only reporting to you that between those 3 headlines, headline #1 is the best performer, but it is not taking into consideration how it interacts with the other elements on the page. It’s not saying that for the page you are testing, headline #1 is the best to use for the roll-out page, but instead – between those 3 headlines, headline #1 is the best performing if you are comparing just the performance of the headline itself. Headline #1 might perform the best out of the 3 headlines when compared to each other out of context with the rest of the page elements, but Headline #2 might perform the best in combination with all the other elements and therefore is the one you want to roll out with (but not necessarily reported this way in the Page Sections report). So please, don’t use the Page Sections report to pick out which elements to roll-out live with.
The Relevance Rating graphic (currently found to the left of each page section), alerts you to how much impact each section had on your test (as defined by your test’s conversion goal). It’s presented as a range, from 0 to 5, with 0 representing that the section had virtually no impact on conversions and a 5 as having a high impact on page conversions.
So while the Page Sections report is important to look at to understand what is happening between the different elements in the page sections themselves, and the Relevance Rating is important to look at to understand what page sections are providing what level of impact to page conversions, you should ideally only use this information to help you gain more insights into the test. Insights that will also give you further help in planning future testing of the page.
However, you will only want to roll-out the panel that is deemed the best performer according to the page Combinations report. Of course this is after you finish running your head-to-head follow-up test between your control and the best performing page combination to verify your results outside of the multivariate testing environment!
Google Analytics App for the iPhone – A Quick Review
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The best Google Analytics App available for the iPhone right now is in my opinion without a doubt (and simply named) Analytics App.
Analytics App gives you complete mobile access to your Google Analytics data from your iPhone. Whether you have just one site profile and one Google Analytics (GA) account, or multiple accounts with multiple profiles, this iPhone app is something I believe you will really be happy with.
For the past two months I have been using Analytics App at least a couple times per day, be it to answer questions on the go for others (i.e. HiPPOS) or even just simply playing around with it for fun to satisfy curiosities. It’s intuitively easy to use with virtually no learning curve for the app itself. Basically just click and there’s your data. I wouldn’t use this for actual data analysis (and this in part because of the limitations of the iPhone itself) but it’s extremely handy and fun to be able to have on the go with you.
Before I purchased it though, I thought it might be difficult to view analytics data on the iPhone due to the screen size, but the interface fits the iPhone perfectly and the data surprisingly is extremely easy to view with no straining on the eyes, even the charts it displays are easy to view.
More than 40 Reports Are Available to You
Analytics App has 9 standard Google Analytics Overview Reports:
- Dashboard, Visitors Overview
- Traffic Overview
- Content Overview
- Event Tracking Overview
- E-Commerce Overview
- Site Search Overview
- Goals Overview
- Quick access Dashboard for Today’s data.
Plus, more than 30 detailed reports you can view by drilling down in each of the areas, for example Keywords, Visitor Loyalty, Top Landing Pages, Top Content, Event Actions, and the ability to view your Custom Reports that have already set up inside your Google Analytics account.
Unfortunately, and unless I am missing something, you can’t click on individual referring sites themselves to view them in the iPhone browser. And, URL’s are limited to 22 characters so in the Top Content Reports you’re not able see the entire URLS or click on them either, so if your URL’s are long and non-intuitive before the 22 characters are used up you may not be able to know which URL is being referred to (but you can always use the Content by Title report).
Viewing Multiple Accounts
I should note, that to view multiple accounts with Analytics App you’ll need to give access for one account to view the others – but this has to be done on GA website itself, or you do it the old fashioned way by logging-out and then log back in on the app for each account itself if you want to view different accounts (I want to emphasize this is for accounts, not profiles as all profiles under your account are visible and selectable when you launch the app).
Misc.
Security: Analytics App stores your GA username and password information locally on your iPhone for security reasons.
Date Ranges: I found that setting the dates to view your data for is actually easier than in Google Analytics using the standard iPhone scroll wheel (and setting it in GA is easy).
Cost
What impressed me the most before I purchased it was that not that it was only $5.99, or that its reviews were overall rather fantastic, but that they offered a money back guarantee via PayPal so I felt that the risk was minimal. I’ve purchased many apps that have left me disappointed, so this was a motivating factor to purchase it on the spot without further consideration.
In Conclusion
So with nothing to lose (your money that is), I would definitely recommend checking the Analytics App out, or if you know someone who already has it to try theirs out – you’ll be glad you did, the app itself is really well produced.
5 Quick Fix SEO Tweaks with Lightning Fast Results
Posted by: | CommentsToday’s post is a guest post from Justin Palmer, Justin is the founder of Palmer Web Marketing, which offers SEO website review services. You can learn more about Justin on Palmer Web Marketing blog, which focuses on internet marketing and website usability strategy for eCommerce websites.
“It’s going to take how long?” - A classic question when it comes to delivering SEO results. After all, everyone knows results today are far more valuable then results tomorrow. At times, SEO can be a business owner’s worst nightmare. Why? Because a good SEO will not promise results in a specific amount of time because there are too many variables. There are, however, several “tweaks” that can bring immediate results to your site if implemented properly. Below is the low-hanging fruit I always look to first.
#1 – Add Internal, Non-Navigational links In my opinion, too many SEO’s focus on obtaining external links while ignoring the low-hanging fruit on their own site. Google is craving informative, contextual links located within a paragraph of page content. Too many sites rely on only navigational links to inform search engines about their content. Contextual links, in contrast with a navigational link appearing on every single page, tells Google you’re linking to a relevant, specific piece of information. If your site has a blog or articles, make sure to sprinkle a few keyword rich links within their content.
#2 – Add a Keyword Phrase(s) to the Title Tag I cringe every time I stumble upon a site with only “Company Name, Inc.” in the title tag. For pages on your site that are already ranking well and have PageRank, adding an additional keyword to the title tag can yield first page ranking for that phrase instantly, assuming the title tag isn’t already too overloaded with keywords. Of course there’s other factors to be considered here, including whether or not your title tag will be readable in the SERPs with this additional phrase.
#3- Remove Keyword Phrase(s) from Title Tags On the other hand, sites with very little incoming link equity will benefit by removing extraneous keywords from an overloaded title tag, focusing only on the phrases that matter most. If your Title tag has 20 keywords in it, ask yourself how many are actually relevant to that page. Then ask yourself how many of these phrases are supported by the page itself, in other words they occur somewhere on the page besides the Title. If they are not supported elsewhere, remove them and create a different page.
#4 – Indented Listing If you already have a page ranking for an important keyword phrase, snagging a second, indented Google listing can effectively double your SERP real estate. How do you get an indented listing? Here’s a 3 step process that works for me.
#5 – Narrow your Focus on Broad Keywords Let’s suppose you’ve done your SEO well, and you’ve landed a first page result for “laptops bags.” You also sell leather laptop bags, and want to rank for this phrase as well. By simply sprinkling the word “leather” into your page content, meta description, and image alt tags, you can leverage your ranking for leather bags, and likely place yourself in a decent position, sometimes without needing the term in the title tag.
Strategical, long term SEO is more complicated than this post suggests. But fortunately, there are always “quick fixes” out there, like the 5 tips listed above. Let’s hear from you. If you had only 3 hours to SEO a website, what tactics would you use?
