Google Website Optimizer - Google Case Study
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009Our account director, Ian Howie, recency gave an interview to Google on the benefits 1upSearch have seen using Google Website Optimizer.
Howie states “Our speciality is return-on-investment.” But while businesses are keen to optimise both their paid and unpaid search, Howie discovered websites are often a blind spot. He believes many web professionals need to fundamentally change their attitude to their websites, in the UK especially. When 1upSearch started to include website optimisation as a service, a common roadblock was that business owners and webmasters viewed the website as ‘complete’. It was not an element of PPC or SEO that is refined and improved over time. It is the shop. You do not rebuild the shop. Howie says “People are still thinking of websites in terms of ‘build it and they will come’. And really in a lot of cases the attitude needs to be ‘build it and we’ll get it wrong but we’ll work out what we got right’ …sometimes it is like telling people the earth is round when they’ve been told the earth is flat”.
As an agency 1upSearch has fully integrated Google Website Optimiser into its marketing services. It has run experiments on websites of different shapes and sizes; from incremental text and image changes to complete website restructures. Website Optimiser has consistently provided the insight to make websites better. Worldfirst is the UK’s fastest growing foreign exchange broker and one of the clients that benefitted from website optimisation. Howie elaborates “These guys were selling a service in an extremely competitive market and in 2008 the currency rates were going all over the place. And we were still able to increase conversions. Website Optimiser has been a big part of that… it shows that just because your market is changing, if you test, you can still reap the benefits. But if you leave stuff static, you are going down with the market.” 1upSearch experimented with the text of the home page, changed the links and added a block of benefits to the page. The result was a 20% improvement in conversions.
The consistent success of Google Website Optimiser in creating conversion-driven websites prompted 1upSearch to adapt its business offering. Howie says “Our pitch to every customer now involves, what we call TOP: Traffic Optimisation Process. It tries to encompass a PPC campaign, an SEO campaign and the conversion products together with Google Analytics.” TOP is a move away from the more general online marketing consultancy of a few years ago. 1upSearch believes it is an offering more suited to the modern online business. Howie says “You may have a lot of traffic. Great. But let’s make more use of the traffic you’ve got. Or you may be a customer who doesn’t have the right traffic. If so we’ll make sure you have optimised traffic, optimised landing pages, optimised conversions.” He is unambiguous about the benefits of Website Optimiser “The thing we like about it most is that it does the job. It is very clear what it does and it is given away for free. It is very powerful for a free product. You don’t get half a product. You get the full product.”











