Content Experiments

Let your site visitors help you improve your website.

ECommerce websites rely on a type of conversion in order to succeed. Your business may focus on website visitors making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, registering on the site, or requesting a quote or consultation. Whatever your call-to-action might be, there are ways to test whether you can improve your conversion rates. Through Google Analytics, you can perform content experiments to see if varying content can better encourage visitors to perform a call-to-action or one of many other metrics that you may want to improve.

How Do Content Experiments Work?

Content experiments are extremely popular because they allow testing of individual web pages with up to 10 variations per page. Unlike A/B testing, where you test several components against each other, content experiments test only one component on each page. For example, you may want to test the text on your landing page. With a content experiment, you can test 10 variations of text that utilize the same layout and images -- the only difference is the text. Of course, you can test different page elements as many times as you want with up to 10 variations each time.

Many of our clients rely on content experiments to compare web pages, landing pages and web apps with their consumers. To do this, we determine which percentage of site visitors will be included in the experiment. Then, we create variations of the page you want to test. Depending on the metric you want to improve, there may be an advantage to which component you change. Metrics are the statistics of your websites, and the ones we focus on primarily are session times (how long visitors stay on a page or website), page exits (the number of times visitors exit your pages before completing a call-to-action or cycling through your site), bounce rate (how many people immediately leave your site after arrival) and conversion rate.

The most common areas to test during a content experiment include page layout, calls-to-action, textual content, images, and headlines/headers. Each of these primary page elements can have a bigger impact on your site visitors than you may realize. And it is through these elements that you can try to reach analytical goals, such as URL destinations, event (call-to-action), session, and pages-per-session goals.

Google Analytics & Content Experiments

Content experiments can be performed through the web-based program of Google Analytics. Google offers an experiment-setup wizard and  a list of available experiments, and delivers individual reports after each experiment has concluded. These tools can help guide you through creating a content experiment. However, many of clients prefer to let us manage and monitor their experiments. At Gainesville Marketing, we have the experience and expertise to create and conduct content experiments as well as analyze the results. Google only provides the data -- it doesn’t tell you what the data means or how you can use the data to improve your metrics. For that deep analysis, it’s best to work with an inbound marketing company you trust, like Gainesville Marketing in Gainesville.

When you create a content experiment, you can choose the metric, percentage of traffic to involve in the experiment, a minimum timeframe for which the experiment will run, and a threshold that, when reached, can end the experiment. Content experiments may be extended if you aren’t receiving the amount of traffic you need to identify a clear winning element. And some experiments may need to be repeated if you want better results.

Gainesville Marketing’s Service

At Gainesville Marketing, we want your web pages and website to work for you, whether you’re trying to improve conversion rates or session time. The goals of your business are important to us, and we will keep working until your content experiments provide the best results. Because there are multiple elements to every page, and perhaps many pages to your eCommerce marketing strategy, we recommend performing content experiments often to continually improve your business. Let us help your business grow with content experiments.