Website Optimiser

Planning your first experiment

While it's easy to set up experiments using Website Optimiser, each one will benefit greatly from a bit of preparation and planning before you begin. Before you visit the Website Optimiser tool, we recommend completing the following steps.

1. Choose the page you'd like to test

For the most part, you'll be testing the landing page of your advertising campaign. However, any high-traffic page is a good one to test, whether it's the home-page or a particular product page. As a general rule, pages with lots of traffic are generally faster to optimise than low traffic pages, since trends in results become clear quickly.

You will also need to decide what content to test on the page. For more ideas on what variables to test, please see our next section on “Identifying what content to test“.

2. Create alternative versions of the test page

Once you have decided on what page and content to test you will then be ready to create new page variations. Create different versions of the page you're testing, and upload them to your server. You can vary as much or as little of the page as you like – Website Optimiser will display each of your alternative versions to different visitors. All of your page variations should lead to the same conversion page, meaning they should all be directing the user to take the same action (whether that's completing a purchase, or submitting an enquiry).

For your first test we would recommend testing 2-4 page variations, since with more page variations, it can take longer to see results.

3. Identify your conversion page – reword include conversion term

Figure out which page of your site represents 'success' - it could be a purchase or enquiry confirmation depending on the business type. Once you start testing your variation pages, WO will measure what proportion of visitors who see each variation go on to reach your conversion page. In this way, you'll be able to see which page is producing the best results for you (sales, leads etc).

Note: If you use a conversion goal that doesn't happen very often, it will take much longer to find the most effective content. For your first test, choose a goal that is more commonly completed (e.g. adding an item to a shopping cart, clicking on a product details page, etc).