By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

You’ve been tracking your website’s performance and optimizing it to perform better for search engines. Now it’s time to use one of the most proven methods for increasing the effectiveness of your website – A / B Testing.

The concept behind A / B Testing goes back to direct mail marketing, where companies would send out multiple versions of a mailer and see which ones performed better. You can apply this same concept to your website by creating multiple versions of a page and splitting your traffic between them to see which version is more effective. We’ll go through the entire process from start to finish, including setting up A / B testing, choosing pages to test, establishing testing parameters, creating different versions of a page, and planning for future optimization.

1. How To Set Up A / B Testing
Many companies offer A / B Testing services at a range of price points. The best service for your organization depends on your level of need and ability. You might use a service that does everything for you including deciding which variables to test, or you might want to have full control over the process. One service of note is offered by Google – they provide a free A / B Testing service to all Google Analytics users. If you have the necessary skill, you can also use Javascript to show different versions of a page or selected elements on a page and track their performance manually using your analytics solution. MemberClicks can provide this service for a small fee.

Also, if you don’t want to use a separate service or write the necessary code yourself, you can use sequential testing. Sequential A / B testing involves making one version of a page live on certain days and then switching that version out on other days. Though this is not quite as accurate as true A / B testing, it can provide you with valuable information, if your content is not time-sensitive.

For instance, you might run one version of your web page for a week and use a different version of the same page the following week. By comparing their relative performance in your analytics solution, you can see which version performs better. However, this would not work very well for a site that provided frequently updated content, since site performance could vary on a week-by-week basis normally.

2. Choosing Pages To Test
Once you have a solution for A / B testing in place, you’ll need to determine which pages you want to test. If you are just getting started, you might want to focus on a few key pages, such as your website’s home page, a search engine landing page or a form that you want visitors to complete. What you need to test depends on your website and how you determine success. For example, if you want visitors to fill out a Request Information form, that’s where you should start. If you simply want to increase the time visitors spend on your site and lower your bounce rate, your home page is a good place to begin.

After you have some experience with A / B testing, you might want to expand it to more pages or even your whole site. But it’s best to start out with a page or two, so you can effectively determine what is working.

3. Establishing Testing Parameters
You can use A / B testing in a number of ways. For instance, if you have two competing design ideas, you can test them against each other to see which performs better. If your site has problem areas – pages with low visits or high bounce rates – you can use A / B testing to try out different versions and determine what the problem is. If you are trying to entice more visitors into filling out a form, you can change different form elements to see which one garners more conversions.

Whatever your goal is, you need to have a clear vision for how to use A / B testing in order to establish the best testing parameters. You’ll need to think about how long you want the tests to run. If you have a large amount of traffic, you might only need to test for a few days or weeks, but if you don’t, you may need to run your test for a few months. You might want to run the test until you reach a specified number of visitors or conversions.

Once you know how long to run the test, you need to also identify what variables will determine which version is more successful. If your goal is to increase conversions, then the more successful version will be easy to determine – it will be the one with a greater number of conversions. If your goal is to fix a problem with a page, such as a low visit rate, the version that performs better in that area will be the winner. Whatever your measure of success is, make sure you know which data to observe. With this information in hand, you’re ready to create different versions of your page.

4. Creating Different Versions Of A Page
For your first test, you should create two radically different versions of the same page. You’ll want to have basically the same content with two very different presentations. If one version is heavily text-based, the other should use plenty of graphics. By creating two very different versions, you are practically guaranteeing that one will significantly outperform the other. This also gives you the opportunity to try out new approaches like video or integrated social media tools and see if they have an impact on your goals. Don’t be afraid to try something unexpected – often, the best performance improvements arise from this sort of experimentation.

5. Planning For Future Optimization
When you have established a control page, you can then start tweaking smaller elements on the page to see which leads to better performance. Some standard elements you might want to test include headlines, calls to action, copy, graphics, and colors.
It’s important to keep in mind when testing smaller individual elements that the best results are gleaned over a large amount of time. If you test out two similar headlines against one another, you might not notice an immediate difference in performance between them. But over time, the difference will become apparent, so run tests on smaller elements for a longer period of time.

A Path For Continual Improvement
By following these five steps, you have a clear path for continual improvement of your website. There are several advantages to this. For one, it provides you with clear, hard data about what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes it is difficult to convince others that one approach is best when you are simply relying on expertise or opinion, but if you can test out the idea, there’s no doubt about what performs better.

Another advantage is that you can maximize your website’s performance by continually improving the way it works. Whether you are trying to increase conversion rates or test out new designs, A / B testing will empower you with the necessary information to make smart choices.

But perhaps the most important advantage is that you gain insight into your visitors and thus into your organization. The more you test, the more you will learn about the behavior of your website’s users. Thus, you’ll be better able to serve them by understanding what they want and how they act on your website.

In lieu of a Friday Top Five post today, I wanted to share the winners of our Small Staff Appreciation Month giveaway instead! It’s been an exciting month as we had daily giveaway and today, we announced our grand prize winner, who will receive an iPad 2.

Congratulations to everyone, and thank you for participating!

Grand Prize – iPad 2 Winner
Jennifer Wingate of the  National Association of School Resource Officers

Weekly Gift Card Winners
Keely Yates  of the  South Carolina Society of Association Executives
Kimberly Starks  of the  Association of University Programs in Health Administration
Hilary  Carroll  of the  Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin

Daily Winners
Kathy  Baker  of the  Wake Forest University Family Business Center
Sharon Smith  of the  Environmental Education Alliance Of Georgia
Lisa Mandelert  of the  Ohio Association for the Education of Young Children
Brandi  Milliet  of the  Elmwood Business Association
Karl Kirsch  of the  Oracle Applications Users Group
Amy Barra  of the  Intermediaries & Reinsurance Underwriters Association
Laurie LoRe Gussak  of the  Florida Disabled Outdoors Association
Deborah Reeder  of the  American Association of Equine Veterinary Technicians and Assistants
Valerie  Sprague  of the  National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks
Jessica Dunker  of the  Iowa Restaurant Association
Caitlin  Terling  of the  Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership
Kristen  Graf  of the  Women of Wind Energy (WoWE)
Karen Oshman  of the  Wisconsin Physical Therapy Association
Jerrell  Welch  of the  Oklahoma Dental Association
Stacy Hodgins  of the  Houston Wellness Association
Debbie Ellis  of the  Salmon Valley Chamber of Commerce

By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

You’ve got a website and have been tracking its performance. You have a web analytics solution in place, and you’ve created clearly defined goals that allow you to make sense of all the data at your fingertips. Now that you know what success means for your website, it’s time to take a look at how you can make your website more successful. One way to improve your website’s performance is to optimize it for search engines. The dominant search engine is currently Google, so we’ll be focusing primarily on tactics that work with Google. However, historically, these practices have led to better performance across all search engines.
SEO – What Is It?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of improving the ranking of a website for certain keywords or key phrases on search engines. Keywords or key phrases are the words that a visitor to a search engine types in when they perform a search. The higher you rank in the results that appear for a keyword, the more visitors you will have. SEO isn’t for everyone – some sites want to stay private or members-only. But any site that wants to have more visitors (and that’s most of them), proper SEO is essential.

The key to successful search engine optimization lies in knowing how search engines rank their results. While the exact algorithms that search engines use are closely-guarded secrets which are regularly updated to prevent people from gaming the system, there are many well-known, industry-standard tactics that are universally accepted as best practices in optimizing a website. We’ll focus on a few of those tactics.

Getting Started
Before you can improve your ranking for any keywords, you need to make sure that search engines know about your site in the first place. Search engines regularly send out programs known as crawlers that follow links from one web page to another, reading all the content on those pages. This process is known as indexing a page.

If another site that is already being indexed by a search engine links to your site, then your site will also be indexed, because crawlers will normally follow every link on every page they encounter. But if no one is linking to your site, you may need to submit your site to a search engine. All search engines have pages that allow you to enter your site’s URL and they will begin indexing it.

If your site has a site map, you only need to submit one page that links to that site map. Since the site map will link to every relevant page of your site, the crawler will follow all of its links and index the entirety of your site automatically. This is why a well- thought-out site map is a necessity for an optimized website; otherwise, the crawler may not find all of your content.

If you don’t want certain pages to be indexed, you can prevent a crawler from going to certain pages either by password-protecting them or by using a special file named “robots.txt” to tell them which pages they aren’t allowed to visit. So you can have total control over how your site is indexed. Once a search engine starts indexing your site, you don’t have to worry about resubmitting it if you make any changes in the future. It will keep indexing your site from that point onwards, unless you tell it otherwise.

Optimizing Your Site And Its Content
Once you have submitted your site to a search engine, there are many steps you can take to improve how it ranks and thus drive more visitors to your site. While you can make many of these changes yourself, you can also rely on a company to optimize your site for you (MemberClicks offers a range of SEO options with our web design packages).

Keep in mind that most of these tactics focus on getting results for individual keywords and key phrases. You should have a good idea of what keywords and phrases people would use to look for a site like yours.

The title of a web page is one of the highest-rated factors that search engines use to determine what that page is about. If you have certain keywords that are important to the identity of your site, it’s a good idea to work them into the title of the page. Similarly, the base URL of your website is a very important factor. Most organizations will have a URL that matches their name, but sometimes it’s a good idea to have a URL that matches your most desired keyword or phrase. For instance, if you’re an Atlanta-based bicycle shop, having the URL “atlantabicycles.com” would serve you better than having your name in your URL.

Another important factor is the number of links that link to a page and the text of those links. While you can’t always control how other sites link to you, you can control how you link to pages within your own site. Using your desired keywords or phrases as the text of links to pages about those keywords or phrases will help improve your ranking, as will making sure those links are easy-to-find and repeated throughout the site (in a footer or header navigation and on the site map, for instance).

Though not as important as they used to be, a web page’s meta data, including the meta description tag, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site’s search listings. The meta description tag contains the text you see after a link in the search results, so it’s particularly important for attracting visitors.

What To Avoid
In choosing a service to optimize your site, you need to be careful. In general, any service that promises to get you to the top of the search results for a particular phrase should not be trusted – they are likely using what are known as “black hat” tactics. These are practices that exploit weaknesses in the search engine algorithms, allowing a website to rank highly for keywords about which it may not even have any content.

One powerful black hat tactic is the use of “link farms.” These are networks of sites that serve no purpose other than to attract search engine crawlers. By establishing a network of hundreds of links, they can force content to the top of the results page by sheer number of links alone.

Another tactic to avoid is “keyword stuffing,” or putting a large number of unrelated keywords on a page in the hopes of drawing traffic. Hiding keywords by moving them off-screen or making them the same color as their backgrounds are similarly frowned-upon tactics. If a search engine catches a site using these tactics, they will often ban the site, sometimes permanently. Since search engines drive nearly all traffic to the web, this is a kiss of death for most sites. And search engines have gotten very good at finding these tactics.

What Comes Next?
Once you’ve optimized your site, you’ll want to monitor it using your analytics solution to see how it’s performing. By checking to see what keywords people use to reach your site, you can continue further optimizing your site by shaping it around those keywords. After that, there are many avenues you can explore to drive more traffic your way – paid advertising and further optimization.

By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

Goals – What Are They?

Put simply, a goal is an action a user can take on your website that leads to a positive result for your organization. This could be a sale of a product, a registration for an event, or a new signup for a membership. Or it could be something much more intangible, such as filling out a survey or answering a poll question. Maybe you have written an article that you want your membership to read – in that case, the goal is as simple as getting them to the page. You will likely have several goals on your website, and they may change over time.

Whatever the goal is, setting up and monitoring the metrics for a goal in your analytics solution will save you time by providing a quick snapshot of the success or failure of an initiative. Instead of digging down through your analytics reports and manually looking to see how many hits you’ve gotten over time, if you have set up a goal, you can instantly see if it has been successful or not.

The most common way to set up a goal is to have a page act solely as the end point for a goal. That way, whenever that page receives a hit, you know that the goal has been accomplished. Some examples of this sort of goal include:

• A ‘thank you’ page after a user has submitted information through a form. You would use this type of goal to track newsletter signups, email list subscriptions, application forms, contact forms and many other similar forms.
• A purchase confirmation page or receipt page
• An ‘About us’ page
• A particular news article

Once you have decided what you want to measure, you should think about what type of goal will best help you determine success.

Types Of Goals

The most common type of goal is a URL Destination. The examples given above are all URL destinations. These are easy to measure as each hit the destination receives counts as a positive result. In this way, you can establish realistic, tangible metrics for how many hits each goal should be receiving. If you have a membership of 500 individuals, and you want at least half of them to read a particular “members-only” article, in this case, you’d be looking for 250 hits for that article.

One thing to keep in mind about URL Destination goals is that you need to specify the correct page as your goal. You might think that you should target the first page of a form as your goal, but this will only tell you how many people reached the front page. That number will include people who go to the page and leave or who start to fill out the form but quit halfway through. Since you wouldn’t count those as succesful objectives, you want to set the “thank you” or “confirmation” page that appears only after someone has successfully completed the form as your goal. The only people who will get to that page are the ones who have filled out the form successfully.

A second type of goal is Time Spent On Site. Let’s say you have lots of content on your site – news, articles, updates or any kind of content you want your visitors to see – and you want to know how engaged your visitors are with new content versus old content. Time Spent On Site goals will show you how much time visitors spend on specified pages. You can compare these numbers across different types of content to see which sections of your site are most engaging.
While Time Spent On Site goals are useful for comparing large amounts of data to one another or relatively measuring how engaging some types of content are in comparison to others, these types of goals are not good for very precise metrics. The biggest problem with measuring the amount of time a user spends on a particular page is that it may not accurately reflect how much time that user spent actively interacting with a page. After all, with tabbed browsers and computers that can easily perform several actions at once, many users will leave sites up on their screens or on a hidden tab without engaging with the site.
The third type of goal is Pages Per Visit. This measures how many pages each unique visitor navigates to on average when they visit your site. This type of goal is useful if your site contains a great amount of content or you want your visitors to go to many different parts of your site for some reason. A large Pages Per Visit number will tell you that a visitor is very engaged with your site, while a small number will tell you that they aren’t as involved.

What Comes Next?

Once you’ve determined how you want to use goals, setting them up should be an easy process. Google Analytics makes it easy to define goals and then view those goals in customized reports. But whatever analytics solution you’re using, it should provide you
the tools to easily define your goals. And once those goals are defined, you’ll be able to concretely measure how successful your website is in your own terms.

Image source

By Adam Kearney, MemberClicks Creative Director

We recommend using Google Analytics to track your website’s performance. It is freely available, constantly updated and extremely customizable. To get started with it, go here: http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Once your account is all set up, you need to add the tracking code to your site. Google walks you through this process, but if you are using MemberClicks to host your site, the process couldn’t be easier. Just go to Website > Site Settings and enter the code that they give you in the box provided for it at the bottom of the page. MemberClicks will automatically add the code to all of your pages. That’s all you have to do. After that, you’ll be able to pull up analytics information for your site within minutes.

What Comes Next?

Once you have a web analytics solution in place and have a clear idea of how you want your site to perform, you can explore all the opportunities available to you. You can optimize your site to increase the traffic you get from search engines. You can buy pay-per- click advertising to drive traffic to specific pages or to your site in general. You can even sell ad space on your site and earn non-dues revenue by attracting a large base of regular visitors. We’ll explore all these topics in later articles in this series.

For now, you’ve got everything you need to understand about web analytics. You know what it is and how it works and have an idea of what it can do for you. And you know how to get started. So what are you waiting for?

You’ve chosen a web analytics solution, and it’s tracking data about your website. You can learn a few things just by looking at this data, such as what your visitor demographics are like or what pages they are hitting. But how do you measure the success of a website? Is your website successful because you get 500 hits each day? What if you get 5,000? What if you only get 5, but each of those 5 hits makes a donation or joins your organization?

These are the kinds of questions that will help shape your website moving forward as you define and measure goals.

Don’t forget – October is Small Staff Appreciation Month! If you haven’t entered our giveaway yet, what are you waiting for?! You could win an iPad 2!