Google Optimize

As a digital media agency, we hold ourselves accountable for the performance of our client’s digital marketing campaigns. Doing so involves adequately managing investments towards the best channels, audiences, creatives, bidding, and more from a campaign management perspective. One item commonly overlooked or underappreciated within digital campaigns is the role in which the destination of these campaigns plays.

Maximizing the effectiveness of your landing pages cannot be understated. The landing URL(s) of a digital campaign is the common denominator of your success. You could spend all the money globally while having the best campaign set up only to find that your campaign performance struggles because your landing pages are slow, technically unsound, or a nightmare from a usability perspective.

Introducing new landing page experiences or alternative approaches is one way to guarantee that you’re evolving a critical link in the chain of your digital marketing efforts. And, one way to ensure you’re moving in the right direction is to test different approaches with landing page testing tools, such as Google Optimize.

What Exactly is Google Optimize?

Google Optimize is a free and excellent tool for landing page testing. Just as you can create and test the effectiveness of multiple ads within Google Ads, Google Optimize enables you to create multiple landing page variations to rotate.

Presenting landing page visitors with different page variations or experiences lets you see what works best in terms of performance KPIs (example: conversion rate) and ultimately the elements which help drive your business forward.

Experimenting with different ads allows you to see which performs best in Click-Thru Rate (CTR). Testing various landing pages usually focuses on Conversion Rate (CVR), often referred to as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

After creating a free Google Optimize account and installing it on your website, you will have the ability to create landing page A/B tests/experiments at no charge via Visual editor.

Experiments or tests point visitors to different landing page variations you can either create within Optimize or your website’s CMS system.

How to Take Advantage of Google Optimize

Optimize acts somewhat like a mini CMS system in that you’re able to create copies of your landing pages and then alter them (edit headlines, body copy, form colors, button colors, move page elements up/down) for testing. 

You can also point to entirely different URLs created within your CMS instead of Optimize-created variations for A/B landing page tests.

Regardless of how you create the test page, Optimize enables you to split traffic to these new iterations of your landing pages however you’d like (50/50, 60/40, 70/30). Optimize code typically resides in the header of your landing page code, acting as a traffic officer directing traffic however you would like.

Optimize integration with Google Ads enables you to easily target experiments and personalized experiences at Google Ads accounts, campaigns, ad groups, and keywords and have it persist while a visitor navigates your website. This allows you to personalize your existing web pages based on specific ads that users click.

Optimize also integrates directly with Google Analytics (GA) for goal tracking to see which landing page variation performs best in terms of conversion rate or any other KPIs pulled in from GA.

How to Setup Google Optimize Landing Pages

Installation involves a minor code update to the header of your website code or via Google Tag Manager. After installation, you set up a test by choosing a control URL to test and then modifying that URL to create a test page or point to a different landing page URL.

Usually, tests come with hypotheses, such as We believe that by changing the button color of the “Add to Cart” button to green, we will draw more attention to this area and increase conversions.

After creating your test page(s), you can then activate the experiment and see how each page performs in terms of KPIs. When a visitor requests a page, Optimize code will direct visitors randomly to each page as set up within your test. You can also isolate tests to specific visitors, such as mobile devices only.

Google Optimize displays data on how the control and test page performs against KPIs while also adding statistically significant indications for tests. For example, Test Landing Page (B) converted 10% higher than the Control Landing Page (A) with 95% statistical significance or confidence level.

Depending on the level of traffic, experiments or tests can last anywhere from 2 weeks (high traffic) to 2 months (low traffic).

If a test page outperforms an existing website/landing page, the site owner will typically modify the control page to match the winning experience.

Optimize allows you to point 100% of traffic to the winning variation to maximize campaign/landing page performance until the control page is modified by a developer or updated to the winning version.

Optimize Now

Regardless of what you’re selling, Google Optimize is worth a test run to see how the tool can improve your landing page conversion rate and experience. If nothing else, it’s free to use!

If your team is interested in learning more about how Optimize can fit within your existing digital marketing initiatives, you can reach out to us at sales@leverinteractive.com. We’re more than happy to help you with your digital marketing needs.

Here’s additional info on how to get started:

Step One: Create an Account
Step Two: Install Optimize on your website
Step Three: Create an A/B test

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