1. 5 Ways to Supercharge Split
Testing With Analytics
Presented by Rob Kingston

2. About Optimisation Beacon
• Ex-Hitwise, >6 years experience in digital
• Analytics + conversion optimisation focus

3. Analytics + optimisation blog

4. Agenda
1. Split testing 101
2. A little quiz
3. Using GA in your split testing process
4. Question time

5. Split testing: Analytics sorcery
Page A
Page B
Traffic
100 sales
125 sales
50%
50%
Winner: 25% more sales

6. A LITTLE QUIZ

7. Which form was completed more?
Source: http://whichtestwon.com/archives/8154
Winner by
88.7%
Long form vs. Short form

8. Which offer drove more clicks?
Winner by
171%
Free offer vs. No offer
Source: http://whichtestwon.com/archives/3889

9. Which form got more subscribers?
Winner by
14.5%
Source: http://whichtestwon.com/archives/3889
Short text vs. long text

10. Why split test?
• Our guts are often wrong 1, 2
– Microsoft: 33% ideas win
– Amazon: 50% ideas win
– App Sumo: 12.5% ideas win
• Testing helps us actually improve
conversion rates
1: http://exp-platform.com/Documents/2010-04%20ExP%20SDForum.pdf
2: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/a-b-testing-tips/

11. Why split test? Cont.
• “Companies that split test convert better”
Source:
http://success.adobe.com/assets/en/downloads/whitepaper/Adobe2013Digital
MarketingOptimizationSurvey_FinalReport_April2013.pdf

12. Hardest part: What do we test?
• GA is one of many data sources to use:
Test
Ideas

13. USING ANALYTICS TO AUGMENT YOUR
TESTING

14. 1. WHICH PAGES SHOULD I OPTIMIZE?

15. Can’t go past the goal funnel reports
• Absolute staple
• Start from the highest
abandonment pages

16. Top landing pages
• Another staple report
– Content
– Site Content
– Landing pages
• Go for high-traffic, low
conversion rate pages

17. Find out how much traffic you need…
• Use traffic values to pages for your sample
estimation:
• http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-split-
test-duration/

18. 2. WHAT IS THE VISITOR’S INTENT?

19. Look at the referrers of your test page
• Drill down in the content or landing page
reports by traffic channel / keyword

20. Look at the internal search terms

21. 3. WHICH ELEMENTS ARE WORTH
TESTING?

22. In-page analytics
• Content > Site Content > All Pages > In-Page

23. See which links are used
• Maybe my headlines need some work:
Visitor, Y U NO click
blog post!?!

24. Sometimes, outbound links tell you
what visitors want to see on the page
Tons of heat on
this button…
Adding “What we
cover” to this
page sold $20K in
policies each
month

25. In-page Analytics is semi accurate
• Enhanced link attribution helps distinguish
between multiple links to same page
• Go here to install it:
– https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2
558867?hl=en&ref_topic=2558810

26. 4. TRACKING EXPERIMENTS IN GA

27. But Rooooooob…. Optimizely does this
already 
Well… GA has some tricks up its sleeve:
1. Reports and filters – already setup
2. Redundancy + retroactive reporting
3. Keep your tool/agency “honest”

28. Plus - All the cool split test tools do it…
• Optimizely
• Visual Website Optimizer
• Cohorts.js (my personal favourite)
• Unbounce

29. Just collect the data and crunch it in
your favourite calculator
• http://www.optimisation
beacon.com/tools-
tweaks/graphing-abn-
split-test-calculator/

30. OK. There’s more to it, but read my
latest post (when it’s live)…

31. 5. FORM OPTIMISATION

32. Track your form fields with GA

33. Which fields are scaring customers?
Field Visits Abandonments
Name 1992 5.82%
Email 1876 5.54%
Number 1772 27.37%
Postcode 1287 6.92%
Conversions 1198

34. Fewer fields are better… usually
Hint: Pre-fill “difficult” fields

35. The code to track form fields
• Here’s the code (trivial to add via Google
Tag Manager):
https://github.com/MartijnVisser/form-
tracker/blob/master/form-tracker.js
• Note: Requires jQuery

36. Lead gen sites: Track actual sales
• You can do this by tracking lead IDs and
your split tests in GA…
Split test
variation
Lead ID
Google
Analytics
CRM /
Sales
Database
http://www.optimisationbeacon.com/analytics/track-leads-from-traffic-source-to-
point-of-sale-in-google-analytics/

37. Questions?
If we don’t have time, come chat
with me afterwards (I don’t bite)

38. Robert Kingston
m: 0409487930
e: rob@optimisationbeacon.com
w: www.optimisationbeacon.com