Q: How can you ensure that the same visitor sees the same page on every visit?

A: When a visitor lands on a GWO test page, Google drops a cookie. Now Google can identify that visitor by the cookie and will automatically publish the same version of the page each time the visitor lands on the test page. This way the test is seamless to the visitor – they won’t even know they are participating in your test.

Q: Does GWO indicate when you have statistically significant results and can confidently declare a winner?

A: Yes GWO will declare a winner when there is significant data. This will only happen if there is a winner – if your test pages are very similar the conversion rates will be too. IE there may never be a significant winner no matter how much traffic you put through. So make sure you test big meaningful things.

Q: Is there a limit/max volume the optimizer tool can handle? Some pages get significant volumes

A: Google has put a lot of resources into the product because they want you to feel comfortable running test on very high volume pages. And if the Google code does fail, their system will automatically default back to the original page, so there is very little risk.

What are the most EFFECTIVE and ACTIONABLE KPIs for an e-commerce website?

• Product page conversion rates
• Site wide conversion rates
• Campaign conversion rates
• Visitors/day
• Average value/sale
• Revenue/day

All of these can effectively be tracked in Google Analytics - the only KPI mentioned above that may be a little tricky to discover is the conversion rate by product page. You can find this metric by located the specific page in the top content report, segmenting the page by source, and clicking the ecommerce tab. This report will give you the overall conversion rate for the page, and it will break down each referral's (campaigns) conversion rate.

Both these questions are about Google Analytics and are very similar, so I grouped them together.

Q: We currently use Google Analytics, and tried to upgrade to the new ga.js tracking code but were getting inaccurate, unusually high bounce rates. We have reverted back to the urchin.js tracking code and our bounce rates have returned to normal. Have you experienced this problem, and how would it impact our testing if we were to use the old tracking code vs. the new code?

Q: We recently installed the new Google code and our numbers were off. We found that the new code has issues with visitation, time spent on site and bounce rate. We went back to the old code and all the numbers were back to normal. Is Google fixing this?

A: We have not experienced the specific issues you identified, but without knowing more details about your specific implementation, the problems you had are hard to diagnose. You may want to look at some of the following notes:

1.) When GA.JS was in beta and during the first few weeks of launch, in December, there were some minor issues with the data collection. From our experience, most of these have been resolved.

2.) The original code for ga.js launched in December had issues with Blogger and ASP sites served by IIS. There is now an updated version.

3.) When you are migrating from urchin.js to ga.js you must ensure that you do not have both urchin.js and ga.js code on the same page. urchin.js and ga.js do not play well together and as a result can cause discrepancies in your data. Google has a migration guide available that could be helpful for you. It's available on the Google Code site for Google Analytics. Keep in mind these guides are still in beta: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/

4.) There is a known issue with the Google Web Optimizer tags blocking out the eCommerce tracking data in GA. Google is working on a fix for this and there is a workaround available in the interim.

5.) Be sure to test your updated implementations with a tools such as: a. http://www.sitescanga.com/ b. http://wasp.immeria.net/

Not updating your code to ga.js should not affect your testing at this time, but it will prevent you from getting access to new features that come out.

Also, sooner or later the urchin.js code will stop being supported by Google, meaning that you will have to upgrade to keep using Google Analytics.

Q: How did "petwellbeing.com" generate enough traffic to get complete Web Optimizer (GWO) results. We have used GWO and have had problems generating enough traffic to make GWO timely.

A: This is a very common problem. You should always mine your analytics data prior to running a GWO test. You need to pick pages that get some traffic, it doesn't have to be as much traffic as you think and here’s why. Most people make the conversion page or goal page their “Thank you” page. This is a common mistake; you should make the conversion page the next page after the test page (the next page in the funnel process). So if your running a GWO test on a product page, the conversion page should be the shopping page, if your running a test on the testimonial landing page, the conversion page should be the product page.

If you have your experiments set up properly and your still not getting enough traffic – well you can always buy some from Google Adwords – that’s what they are hoping for.

Q: Would you recommend removing some of the test pages after a few weeks of data based on poor performance?

A: Let your website optimizer tests run through to completion, there is no mechanism to stop showing certain versions unless you stop the current test and create a new test.

Q: Are the variations tested at the same time or over a period of X months?

A: The variations are tested randomly and concurrently.

Q: The importance of the "day effects" is well noted. Are there periods of time during the calendar year which are better/worse for testing (for example the holiday season)?

A: Many clients like to do their tests from January to late summer, because the go into lock down mode during the peak Christmas shopping.

Q: Why is there a step 10 in the process - doing another A/B test on the results you get from the multi variant testing? Why would confidence levels be low enough in order to feel a need to do this?

A: You always A/B test the winner against the original after all the multivariate testing is finished, so that you can definitely see how much lift the process created.

Q: Our company operates two servers - one at a local level, and one at a global level. The local server hosts regional campaigns - the global server hosts the main website. Can we measure localised campaigns when transactions occur on another server?

A: So, you run campaigns that direct users to a localised site. Users then navigate from the localised site to the global site/server to make purchases.

In GA, you can setup a profile that tracks both of these sites in one profile. Google uses first party cookies and will normally set the cookie on the full domain that you are accessing. If the sites are all sub-domains of the same domain, you can set the cookie to be set on the root domain using the _setDomainName() function.

For information on how to do this, you can refer to the Google help at: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55524&topic=11009

If the sites are completely separate domains, both the Google code will need to be updated and all links and forms that go across domains need to have some Google code added to them to pass the cookies on to the new domain.

In the tracking code, you'll need to add:

And on each link and form that cross-over domains you'll need to add the code to pass the cookie information. For links you'll use pageTracker._link() and for forms you'll use pageTracker._linkByPost()

For links, you'll add an onclick event:

OR

For forms you'll add an onsubmit event:

For more information on how to do this you can refer to the Google help at: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55503&topic=11009

The above examples are all done with the new GA.JS code. If you need help doing this with URCHIN.JS, you can follow the above links to the help files and you'll be able to click through to similar help topics related to the URCHIN.JS implementation.

Q: On you previous screen why did you choose one keyword? I think I missed your reasoning.

A: This was because we were using a landing page specifically targeted to that keyword. Sending the traffic generated by a specific keyword to a landing page optimized for that keyword will give you the best results.

Q: Can we create one off landing pages specific to an industry and use SEO to drive traffic, with the landing page as a static page with no links to our main website?

A: Yes you can certainly use SEO to drive traffic to a landing page such as the one you described. The process will be the same as it would be for a page on your website, with one exception. If the landing page is on a separate domain then it will not benefit from the previous SEO done on the main site. So you will be in effect starting from scratch.

Q: Is an A/B test an A combination, B combination and the original, or is one of the options the original (so you are only testing two scenarios)?

A: Using website optimizer you can test a new version of a page (B) against the original version of the page (A) or you can test many versions of a page A/B/C/D…

Q: Is it necessary to use three panels for testing or can you do an A&B test?

A: You can do a simple website optimizer A/B test if you want, there is no need to use three panels.

Q: How long do you do the A/B testing for a given page?

A: Website optimizer will declare a winner for you once one of the versions significantly outperforms the other versions. If you are running an A/B/C/D test, it is possible to have more then one version be declared a winner. A good rule of thumb: let the test run until you get at least 100 conversions on each of the versions.

Q: How do you randomly assign the web pages?
Q: how would you drive traffic to two different versions of that landing page?
Q: How do you implement the randomization of the different landing pages?

A: The randomization is all done by the website optimizer tool on Google’s end. You add some java script to your page, and then Google will do the rest. If for any reason the script fails, Google will serve up the original page to the visitor – so there is no risk of locked up pages.

Q: How were you determining the demographics per individual query?

A: The information was being determined by using the Adlabs Demographics Prediction tool from MSN Adlabs.

Q: How can MSN Ad Labs determine the gender of site visitors/converters? Was their a lead generation form that included a gender field?

A: The Adlabs Demographics Prediction Tool gathers data from users of the Microsoft Passport Network, some manual data, and a few other sources.

Q: What is the definition of SEO and SEM?

A: SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to positively influence the factors that play into where a search engine decides to rank a website within it's organic results. The organic results being the non-sponsored listings that are typically located on the left hand side of a search results page.

SEM is an acronym for search engine marketing. SEM acts as an umbrella term for all the methods of marketing through search engines. It includes search engine optimization, sponsored listings and any other method by which you can drive traffic to your website through a search engine.