There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but since it launched out of beta in March 2017, there's a free CRO package that gives you the ability to run A/B tests across your site. Almost half of smaller businesses don't currently utilize A/B testing, which will mean they're potentially losing vast sums compared to the revenue they could have been generating had they engaged in CRO.
How to do AB tests with Google Optimize
This Quick Win explores what AB testing is, and what process you should use to build a test. We will cover some ideas on what you could test, as well as working out where to focus your attention, hint, don’t just jump to say your homepage, you may want to test somewhere else that will give you a bigger impact.
Access the quick win
That's why this free tool is so powerful. It opens up the possibility of A/B testing to all players, regardless of size. Whilst currently there is a divide between larger businesses able to afford to use a paid A/B testing tool like convert.com (which is a great tool) and smaller business unable to use these tools because of their cost, this free tool from Google will allow all businesses to optimize their conversion rate.
The tool in question is Google Optimize, which was previously part of Google's enterprise testing and personalized service called Google Optimize 360. Google Optimize provides users with many of the features of Google Optimize 360, but without the enterprise level price tag.
The optimize visual editor allows for quick and easy edits via drag and drop, and if you need to it's easy to go into the raw HTML.
Google Optimize also lets you show personalized content to different users based on given rules, so you can start targeting prospects with the most relevant content for them. Again this is nothing new but it is the first time businesses have been able to use this kind of technology for free, opening it up to a whole host of smaller businesses.
The tool also crunches the numbers for you to make it clear which tests are winning, which is great if you don't have a good grasp of statistics so would struggle to work what passes the threshold for a test to be statistically significant.
You can review how tests are performing and see which are meeting the winning criteria in the reporting tab. If you want to set started with Google Optimize for your businesses you can find out more here by taking our 'How to do A/B Tests with Google Optimize' Quick Win.
Of course, there are limitations with the free version of Google Optimize compared to Google Optimize 360 which is a paid service for Google's enterprise clients. The most important is that there is a limit of 3 simultaneous experiments. But that's sufficient to get most small businesses started. Read the comparison table for Optimize vs Optimize 360 for more.
By Carolanne Mangles
Carolanne Mangles Dig DipM is the Digital Marketing Executive for Click Travel, an award-winning corporate travel booking platform. She is a specialist in B2B SaaS and enjoys planning and optimizing the full customer journey across all digital channels to create brand awareness, great user experience and copy that really sells the benefits of the product. She was previously Digital Marketing Executive for Smart Insights where she was involved with multiple digital channels to manage fully integrated membership campaigns to boost new customer acquisition and current membership retention. She has spoken and given masterclasses at B2B Expo on Search and Content Marketing, holds an IDM award in GDPR and loves a glass of red wine. Connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.
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