Brewster Barclay has over 25 years of experience in the technology industries and for the last 6 years has been the Managing Director of Clickstream Technologies. Brewster is passionate about improving and simplifying data tracking for websites and taking it from the dark ages to a fully automated future.
Why is website optimization still so important and how to do it easily
Website optimisation is the art and science of improving the outcomes for the traffic that your marketing department has spent your precious pounds, dollars or euros on. Once your visitors land on your website, you are trying to encourage, cajole, direct them to take the next appropriate steps on each page that will, you hope, lead them down the path to conversion. Not quite a Damascene moment, you will never convert everyone, but there are techniques and methodologies which will increase your probability of conversion.
You could ask, why spend time and money on improving conversion? Why not just spend more money driving traffic to your site? Isn’t that more cost effective? The real answer is almost certainly not. Conversion optimisation exercises will often lead initially to improvements in conversion of 20% or more. So, if you are already selling £10,000 a month from your site, you will now sell another £2,000 a month and this will be every month and not just a one off uplift from buying more traffic. On a one year time horizon, this would be £24,000 more sales from one experiment. It would take a lot of increased marketing spend to ever achieve the same result.
What is stopping website optimisation?
If the numbers in favour of doing optimisation are so clear why don’t more people do website optimisation? Why has every year for the last 4 years been the year for optimisation? I think there are two main reasons. First, marketing, page design and usability have always been “soft” skills in the pre-digital world. It is the great marketing campaigns with wonderful images and tag lines that we all remember. This idea that the marketing will surely come up with the best web pages based on their “experience” inhabits the digital world as well, rather then using rigorous measured testing. The choice is still often made based on the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) and I have suffered from this myself. But does the HiPPO, or anyone else, really know the right colour, right picture and right font?
The second reason preventing more people doing website optimisation is implementation cost and hassle. There are many excellent multivariate and A/B testing tools on the market which will help website owners optimise website pages. However, to implement them requires the website owner to add code to specific pages of their website that they want to test. Also, all except Google Website Optimizer (GWO) have a cost associated with them.
Causes of marketing optimisation paralysis
Clickstream Technologies is finding that the implementation constraints on the deployment of GWO, or other testing tools, is the key factoring limiting the ability of companies, particularly large enterprises, to benefit from website optimisation for the following reasons:
- The code window to put in the code for even one experiment may be 3 to 6 months but…
- The web marketing team do not know in advance which pages or page sections they want to experiment
- The IT director does not want to put active tags into any of the web pages in case it causes the site to crash.
- Tags can frequently be inserted at the wrong place on the page and there is no window to go back and change the tags.
The result of this is can be almost complete marketing paralysis. Few experiments are done, there is no continuous optimisation and multivariate testing is thrown out as not being useful. Back to HiPPO.
Clickstream Technologies’ Answer for Google Website Optimizer
Our answer at Clickstream Technologies is the Datasherpa Platform that squarely addresses the problems of time to implementation, control and simplicity when it comes to deploying GWO or any other tagging based application, including other multivariate testing tools or indeed Google Analytics. This is done by abstracting the tagging problem from being an IT implementation problem to being a simple matter of configuring the Datasherpa Platform that will do all the tagging dynamically.
The Datasherpa Software is generally installed on a proxy server in the same datacenter as the web servers of the company wishing to implement the GWO test (or in the cloud as a Clickstream managed service) and all traffic for the website is routed through the proxy server. See graphic below. This means that the web page is served from the web server to the Datasherpa Proxy server.
- Test page
- Tracking and control tags
- Page sections to be tested and their experiment names
- Conversion page
- Conversion tag
Then, as the page passes through the Datasherpa Proxy server, all these tags are inserted on the correct pages, in the correct spot and associated with the correct page sections. The client then only has to go to their GWO interface to set up or turn on their experiment and all the tagging happens automatically.
What are the advantages of the Datasherpa Platform for the website owner and for any agency helping them to implement GWO?
- Experiments can be implemented in minutes with no need to wait for a code window and no matter how the web pages were created.
- Clients can run multiple experiments in parallel or sequentially to continually optimize their websites.
- The tags are always in the right places
- The IT director is happy as a major headache has been taken away
Conclusion: Simplify and automate your Google Website Optimizer Implementations
Overall, there should be a much happier website owner. Not only can they get the initial boost from optimizing a few key pages but also they will be able to continuously optimize any page on their site to keep increasing conversions. For, in the long run, optimization is not a one step event but an on-going improvement process that all websites should engage in.
If you would like to see a short video demo which shows exactly what has been described above, click this link: http://www.clickstream.com/demos/gwodemo.
By Brewster Barclay | Managing Director, Business Development | Clickstream
