Product Description

Stop guessing, start testing, and enjoy greater success with your website.

If you’re looking for more leads, sales, and profit from your website, then look no further than this expert guide to Google’s free A/B and multivariate website testing tool, Google Website Optimizer. Recognized online marketing guru and New York Times bestselling author, Bryan Eisenberg, and his chief scientist, John Quarto–vonTivadar, show you how to test and tune your site to get more visitors to contact you, buy from you, subscribe to your services, or take profitable actions on your site. This practical and easy–to–follow reference will help you:

• Develop a testing framework to meet your goals and objectives
• Improve your website and move more of your customers to action
• Select and categorize your products and services with a customer–centric view
• Optimize your landing pages and create copy that sells
• Choose the best test for a given application
• Reap the fullest benefits from your testing experience
• Increase conversions with over 250 testing ideas
• Save $25 on Google AdWords with coupon included in the book

Take the guesswork out of your online marketing efforts. Let Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer show you why you should test, how to test, and what to test on your site, and ultimately, help you discover what is best for your site and your bottom line.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29441 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover
If you want more leads, sales, and profits from your website, then you need to test, test, test. Google Website Optimizer is all about testing, and this book shows you how to use that free tool to discover what is best for your site and your bottom line. Recognized online marketing guru Bryan Eisenberg and his chief scientist John Quarto–vonTivadar explain how to test and get more of your visitors to take the actions you want them to take: contact you, buy something, subscribe, or otherwise engage with your site.

• Learn to develop a testing framework and establish goals and parameters
• Determine how well your site calls visitors to take action and learn how to make improvements
• Discover the best approach for selecting and categorizing products
• Optimize your landing pages and revise your content with copy that sells
• Understand exactly which test works best for a given purpose
• Learn what you need to bring to the testing experience to reap the fullest benefits
• Learn how to design impactful tests in sales, lead generation, B2B, and B2C situations
• Get over 250 testing ideas based on all the factors that contribute to a site’s ability to convert online visitors

"I can tell you two things. The first thing is: Testing works. If you’re not doing it well, you’re missing out. The second? Bryan Eisenberg knows what he’s talking about. Time to get started, time to start testing."
—Seth Godin, Author of Meatball Sundae

"Bryan and John have combined years of experience in persua­sive marketing with their deep knowledge of Google Website Optimizer to deliver actionable insights that will make rock stars out of any marketing team."
—Tom Leung, Senior Business Product Manager, Google Website Optimizer

"Bryan Eisenberg delivers the What, Why, and How of closing significantly more online sales."
—Jim Sterne, Founder, Emetrics Summit

"Always Be Testing is by far the most definitive work on the subject of website testing and optimization ever written."
—Eric Petersen, Chief Executive Officer and Principal Consultant, Web Analytics Demystified, Inc.

"With Always Be Testing, the job of testing your marketing is laid out in a practical fashion that anyone can grasp and do in a way that will practically guarantee your conversion success and blow away your competition."
—John Jantsch, Author of Duct Tape Marketing

"Always Be Testing is the essential handbook that gets you testing and keeps you testing. In this game, the difference between Winners and Losers is that Win­ners take the time to figure out which of their ideas stink. Losers don’t. This book is for everyone who wants to be a Winner!"
—Avinash Kaushik, Author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

"Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto–vonTivadar take you through not just how to use Google’s free conversion testing tool, but continually provide both philosophical reasons and practi­cal tips about why businesses need to test."
—Danny Sullivan, Editor–In–Chief, SearchEngineLand.com

"Always Be Testing is a very readable and practical guide to landing page testing from an experienced master practitioner. Pick up a copy before your competitors do!"
—Tim Ash, Author of Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions

"Put this book down now, or you just might double your revenue and give your customers the website they’ve always wanted."
—Mike Moran, Coauthor of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., and Author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules

About the Author
Bryan Eisenberg is the cofounder of FutureNow, Inc., an interactive marketing optimization firm and Google Website Optimizer Authorized consultancy. He is a coauthor of the New York Times bestselling books Call to Action and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? He is a sought–after speaker at major business conferences worldwide, having keynoted events for Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, DMA, MarketingSherpa, E–consultancy, and the Canadian Marketing Association.

John Quarto–vonTivadar, having worked on NASA’s Hubble telescope (the working parts), is chief scientist at FutureNow, Inc., and coinventor of Persuasion Architecture.

Customer Reviews

Essential reading for everyone using Google's Website Optimizer
Provides the background of issues to consider when planning a website optimization programme with Google Website Optimizer. My pick of the features:

* Lot's of case studies and example improvements to site performance to inspire you

* A great buyer behaviour framework to apply so that your site appeals to different types of behaviour

* Describes different forms of test that can be applied with the Google Website Optimizer

* Provides an outline plan of what to test with a short, 2-3 page guide on different topics like:

Tests you should check out are:
* Do anything test (multiple conversion goals)
* Linger tests
* Multipath tests
* Click tests

Ideas on what to test include:
* Up-sell and cross-sell
* User reviews
* Presence or absence of navigation
* Calls-to-action

On the downside, more details on implementation techniques for different tests such as Linger tests would be welcome although they are nicely explained in a website optimisation webinar on the Future Now Site.

Review by Dr Dave Chaffey, author of:
* eMarketing eXcellence: Planning and Optimising Your Digital Marketing (Emarketing Essentials)
* Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice
Total E-mail Marketing: Maximizing your results from integrated e-marketing: Maximizing Your Results from Integrated E-marketing (Emarketing Essentials)

What an excellent book! (paid for itself in the first week)
If you are a bit techie like myself, you might have asked your self (like I have), "Why should I buy a book about Web Optimizer where surly Google took the time to document their product properly?"

If you have been following Bryan, Future now (and their blog) you should know that when it comes to the bottom line, these guys know their stuff and are happy to share their knowledge and first hand insights with others.

When you dive in thought the chapters, you'll see that the book is well structured and offers a "best practices" solution to 90% of the problems that an online business might be facing in today's marketplace and financial climate.

If you have a specific challenge, open the book, go to the legend and I am positive that you shall see the solution you were looking for, it is that easy.

This is how the book pays itself in the first week we got it:

We got a query form a new prospect asking us to up lift conversion rate by 2% (gardening related e-commerce website), we said that we are happy to look at their stats and see how we can help them get there. 4K unique visitors later, we have identified what we thought could be an issue.

It was apparent that visitors are going through the checkout process funnel but for some reason, they either went back to the previous step or just left the website. Now that was interesting! Obviously, something on that step was missing since many were trying to go back to the previous step.

To keep things simple, we compared the previous step and the current step and thats what we have found:

Quantities of the product where missing. Eureka, the users could see quantities for each product in the previous step, but not in this step, thats made them go back and forth and pushed to leave the site without completing the checkout process.

Simple test plan, adding quantities and we were on our way to make more money for out clients.

We have managed to increase conversion by 23.4%, needless to say that our prospect is now our client.

This book is a must have in your online marketing arsenal.