Analyzing your website data with Google Analytics is much like mining for gold. Advanced prospectors profit because they know where to look to find the nuggets, while inexperienced practitioners come up with only dirt after making the mistake of trying to prospect the entire mountain.
If web analytics is like gold mining, then a Google Analytics advanced segment is the pickaxe you need to chisel through your data to expose the glimmering insights inside.
We've tapped into some of the web's finest web analytics professionals to share their tips for mining analytics gold. Here are 16 secret – until now – Google Analytics advanced segments that could make you insights rich, too.

1. Converters by Count of Visit

This first series of segments is one of my favorites given that I work mainly in lead generation for higher education. The Converters by Count of Visit segment series gives you three segments to show behaviors of people who convert after 1 visit, 2-5 visits or after 6+ visits so you can get a feel for what content is consumed and acted upon at various points in the sales funnel.
Google Analytics segment for conversions over time
Link to Segment Series: http://bit.ly/GASS-CbCoV
How to Use this Segment: Start by applying all three segments to any of your favorite content reports to see relative differences in content consumption by count of visit. Then apply them one at a time to take a deeper dive into user behavior across the customer journey

2. Whales

Whales is the e-commerce cousin to my lead gen segment, and it captures visitors who spend a lot with you. For example, if average site revenue is $100, then your Whales segment might be set to capture orders with revenue of over $300. Understanding the behavior of your top customers presents all sorts of opportunities ranging from helping you find more of them to motivating other customers to become top customers.
Google Analytics segment for higher-than-average ecommerce conversions
Link to this Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-Whales
How to Use this Segment: This segment is especially useful when applied to standard or custom reports that show dimensions such as campaigns, keywords, geography, and items purchased.
Segment Contributed by: Avinash Kaushik is the Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google and author of the Occam's Razor blog. Check out his post on segments when you're done reading this one.

3. Organic Image Traffic

Many people with image-rich sites were puzzled when their traffic dropped in late-January due to a change in the way Google Images works. This segment allows you to see search traffic coming from the Google Images search engine separately from regular organic search so you can investigate image-specific search trends.
Google Analytics images advanced segment
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-OrgImg
How to Use this Segment: Apply this segment to your SEO reports to look at keywords, landing pages, and other dimensions typically explored with organic search.
Segment Contributed by: John Doherty is the Office Lead at Distilled NYC. Check out John's work on segments to learn more about segmenting search and social.

4. Screens Under 600 Pixels Wide

Google Analytics user agent detection can be thrown off by the countless new mobile devices on the market. This handy segment filters for a variety of mobile devices by applying a regular expression to the screen size dimension.
It controls for devices that aren't fully detected by Google Analytics by excluding screens with a 0x0 pixel dimension, which is the case for devices prone to detection issues. This segment captures devices with screen resolutions ranging from 100-599 pixels by 100-599 pixels.
Google Analytics advanced segment for user agent detection
How to Use this Segment: Apply this segment to any report where you want to see mobile visitors but don't want to see any devices with screens over 600 pixels wide.
Segment Contributed by: Angie Schottmuller is an accomplished industry speaker and blogger, and the Director of Interactive Strategy and Optimization at Three Deep Marketing.

5. Keyword Length Segment Series

Keyword length segments have appeared in several articles dedicated to advanced segments because looking at traffic by keyword length can reveal significant insights. Segment reports by keywords that consist of 3, 4, 5 and 6+ words with this set of 4 Google Analytics segments to understand the proportion of website visits sent by head terms relative to long-tail terms within your search space.
Google Analytics Segment series for organic keyword length
Link to Segment Series: http://bit.ly/GASS-KWlength
How to Use this Segment: Apply all four segments to any report where keywords are important, such as a keywords performance reports and landing page reports, then apply one at a time for detailed insights.
Segment Contributed by: Justin Cutroni is a web analytics blogger, speaker, and the Analytics Advocate at Google. See more of Justin's advanced segments in the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

6. Common ISPs

The service provider report is a good place to start your investigation when trying to isolate odd activity on your website within your Google Analytics profile. Filter out the vast majority of common ISPs with this advanced segment and reveal culprit ISPs sending large amounts of unnatural traffic.
Google Analytics advanced segment Common ISPs
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-ISPs
How to Use this Segment: Apply this segment to the Network report under the Audience section of Google Analytics. This segment filters out greater than 80 percent of the traffic to your site and allows you to review long tail service providers with ease.
Segment Contributed by: Jeff Sauer is the founder of Jeffalytics.com, VP at Three Deep Marketing and the author of helpful resources including the Periodic Table of Google Analytics.

7. DMA Quartiles

This segment series helps control for population when looking at geographic reports. It uses Neilsen's DMA measurements to group major metros into four quartiles (e.g., Q4 contains cities with a DMA ranked 1-8, including New York, L.A. and Chicago.). Export data using these segments and compare to Neilsen's demographic stats to look beyond raw numbers and into market share for each of the four quartiles.
Google Analytics segment for DMA quartiles
Link to Segment Series: http://bit.ly/GASS-DMAs
How to Use this Segment: Apply these segments to any report with unique visitors as a dimension to determine share of voice by U.S. city for your brand. Export report to Excel. Then add Neilsen's DMA data to the spreadsheet and divide your unique visitors by Neilsen's number of U.S. households to determine your share of voice across markets.
Segment Contributed by: Sayf Sharif is a Web Analyst at LunaMetrics.

8. Blog Bounce Remover

The natural tendency for the majority of all blog traffic is to bounce. After all, the lion's share of visitors just came to your site to read your article and then be on their merry way. This segment doesn't remove blog traffic, but it does remove folks who landed on your blog (defined as "/blog/" here – modify as required for your blog) and only looked at one page.
Google Analytics advanced segment that removes blog bounce rates
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-BlgBnc
How to Use this Segment: Apply this segment to any reports that compare landing pages on your site against your website's goal metrics to identify the top landing pages in the form of both blog posts and other pages on your website.
Segment Contributed by: Thom Craver is a technical SEO and web analytics consultant,speaker and blogger.

9. The Brand Interest Segment

Some pages on your website are created to convey your brand's key messages, such as an "about" page, a "testimonials" page or section about your team. This secret segment series contains three segments that measure different levels of engagement with your brand:
  • People who did not view your brand page (e.g., an "about" page in this example)
  • People who viewed a brand page, but didn't visit your blog
  • People who viewed both your brand page and your blog
Google Analytics advanced segments for branded visits
Link to Segment Series: http://bit.ly/GASS-Brand
How to Use this Segment: Compare users who visited branded pages to those who didn't. You can apply all three segments at once or individually, depending on how you wish to analyze the results. Begin by applying all three to your favorite content reports, then one at a time for a deeper look.
Segment Contributed by: Anna Lewis is the Digital Marketing Executive at Koozai. Explore 15 additional useful segments identified by Anna.

10. Q&A Keyword Monitoring

Some keyword modifiers are dead giveaways for consumer intent. Words such as "how," "what," and "versus" are filtered into this advanced segment with a nifty regular expression.
Google Analytics segment for question and answer monitoring
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-QandA
How to Use this Segment: Mine your own keyword traffic for ideas to add to a Q&A section of your site. If your site doesn't include a Q&A section, consider using this Google Analytics advanced segment to see if people are asking questions you might not be answering.
Segment Contributed by: Kane Jamison submitted this segment after reading Joshua Unseth's article on the same topic.

11. Cart Abandoners by Traffic Source

If you have an ecommerce site, then you probably wonder why people abandon your cart without checking out. The truth is that the answer probably varies greatly, often by source. One way to explore differences in cart abandonment is to segment it by traffic source.
Google Analytics Advanced segment for cart abandonment
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-Carts
How to Use this Segment: This segment teases out cart abandonment for Facebook visitors. Make as many copies of it as you have primary traffic sources. Then apply the segments to your goal funnel reports to inspect whether traffic abandons differently by segment or if there are universal snags in your ecommerce flow.
Segment Contributed by: This advanced segment was contributed by Dan Antonson, Lead Analyst at SMC Pros.

12. Geographic Brand Ripples

Google Analytics reports typically are set up to compare apples to apples, such as comparing your brand's presence in two different cities. This series of segments demonstrates a brand's ripple effect throughout a region by comparing traffic from two main cities (i.e., Minneapolis and St. Paul), the target metro area (i.e., the Twin Cities in Minnesota) and the target state (i.e., Minnesota) for a given brand.
Geography-specific Google Analytics advanced segments
How to Use this Segment: Change up these segments to reflect your key target cities, your metro area and your state. Then combine all three in a geographic report to assess micro vs. local vs. regional trends.
Segment Contributed by: James Svoboda is the Vice President of MnSearch.org and CEO atWebRanking.

13. Cohort Analysis

This segment requires using both custom variables and advanced segments and demonstrates how to segment users along different stages of your sales funnel. Set the following as a custom variable when someone completes a key step, such as the "checkout" process for a free trial:
Google Analytics segment for cohort analysis
_gaq.push(['setCustomVar', 1,'Free Trial Started', 'YYYYMMDD', 1]);
The advanced segment that works with this code identifies the visitor-level variable associated with the user on subsequent visits for as long as their cookie persists. This allows you to see how they behave differently from visitors who haven't started the trial.
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-Cohort
How to Use this Segment: Apply to any conversion-oriented report to look at differences in conversion rates, conversion paths and different content consumed along the way for people on the free trial versus people who haven't yet tried your product or service.
Segment Contributed By: Mike Pantoliano is an SEO Consultant at Distilled and an advanced web analytics speaker and blogger.

14. Conversion Rates: Business Hours vs. Off Hours

Does the conversion rate on your website change when you close the doors to your brick-and-mortar building? This segment – which is similar to day-parting reports from AdWords – compares traffic received during and after business hours.
Google Analytics segments for business hours
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-Hours
How to Use this Segment: Adjust this segment series to align with your business hours. It defaults from 8 a.m. – 9 p.m. (ET) but you can adjust it to align with your own hours of operation and then apply conversion data reports to investigate differences in website performance both before and after hours.
Segment Contributed by: Michael Freeman is the Senior Manager of Search at ShoreTel.

15. Detecting Content Piracy

Is someone stealing content on your website? The content piracy segment allows you to see what traffic has been generated against your Google Analytics profile by any other hostnames that aren't yours.
Content piracy Google Analytics advanced segment
Link to Segment: http://bit.ly/GASS-Piracy
How to Use this Segment: Apply this segment to reports in the Audience section of Google Analytics to inspect the areas and technical characteristics of fake sites created to copy your brand's assets without your permission or benefit.
Segment Contributed by: Pamela Nelson is the Senior Director of Analytics & Reporting forPrime Visibility.

16. Add Your Segment Here

The last Google Analytics secret segment is where you come in. If you've made it this far, then you're very likely to have a Google Analytics advanced segment of your own that you've been keeping to yourself. Consider adding a link to your secret segment – along with instructions on how to use it – in the comments to help others find those nuggets of gold buried deep within their own mountain of web analytics data


Asynchronous and deferred JavaScript execution explained

The HTML <script> element allows you to define when the JavaScript code in your page should start executing. The “async” and “defer” attributes were added to WebKit early September. Firefox has been supporting them quite a while already. Does your browser support the attributes?
§  Normal execution <script>
This is the default behavior of the <script> element. Parsing of the HTML code pauses while the script is executing. For slow servers and heavy scripts this means thatdisplaying the webpage will be delayed.
§  Deferred execution <script defer>
Simply put: delaying script execution until the HTML parser has finished. A positive effect of this attribute is that the DOM will be available for your script. However, since not every browser supports defer yet, don’t rely on it!
§  Asynchronous execution <script async>
Don’t care when the script will be available? Asynchronous is the best of both worlds: HTML parsing may continue and the script will be executed as soon as it’s ready. I’d recommend this for scripts such as Google Analytics.

Loading JavaScript is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks. Under normal circumstances, a scripttag causes the browser to halt rendering, load a file, and run the code. The browser is blocked from doing other useful work because your JavaScript could write to the page, modify existing elements, or redirect to another URL.For this reason, it’s good practice to place script tags at the bottom of the HTML, just before </body>. The browser may be unresponsive for a second or two, but it’s not noticeable because the main content has loaded.However, even that solution is inadequate for today’s multi-megabyte client-side applications. In extreme cases, it’s necessary to load large code libraries using script tag injections or Ajax techniques. This prevents blocking, but requires additional code and rigorous testing to ensure that scripts run in the correct order in all browsers.

The defer Attribute

The defer attribute makes a solemn promise to the browser. It states that your JavaScript does not contain any document.write or DOM modification nastiness:
<script src="file.js" defer></script>
The browser will begin to download file.js and other deferred scripts in parallel without stopping page processing.defer was implemented in Internet Explorer version 4.0 — over 12 years ago! It’s also been available in Firefox since version 3.5.While all deferred scripts are guaranteed to run in sequence, it’s difficult to determine when that will occur. In theory, it should happen after the DOM has completely loaded, shortly before the DOMContentLoaded event. In practice, it depends on the OS and browser, whether the script is cached, and what other scripts are doing at the time.

The async Attribute

async has been introduced in HTML5:
<script src="file.js" async></script>

async is identical to defer, except that the script executes at the first opportunity after download (an optionalonload attribute can be added to run a specific function). You can’t guarantee that scripts will execute in sequence, but they will have loaded by the time the window onload event fires.There’s support for async in Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.5, and the latest WebKit build, so it should appear in the next versions of Chrome and Safari. IE9 is yet to support async, but the IE team could easily add it as an alias for defer. You can use bothasync and defer to support all browsers — even IE4.Perhaps within a few months, we’ll finally have a native, non-blocking JavaScript loading method that works in all browsers.
One source Google uses to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.
To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:
<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">
To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:
<meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP">
If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:
<meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP, nofollow">
Note that once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear in the index.
If you're concerned about content in your title or snippet, you may want to double-check that this content doesn't appear on your site. If it does, changing it may affect your Google snippet after we next crawl your site. If it doesn't, try searching Google.com for the title or snippet enclosed in quotation marks. This will display pages on the web that refer to your site using this text. If you contact these webmasters to request that they change their information about your site, any changes to their sites will be recognized by our crawler after we next crawl their pages.

Finally it's here: our Ranking Factors – Rank Correlation 2013 Study!

Like last year, the Ranking Factor – Rank Correlation study deals with the definition and evaluation of factors that differentiate better-positioned websites from pages placed further back in the organic search results – i.e.: pages that have a positive rank correlation.
Compared to 2012, we have taken significantly more ranking factors into account in our analysis to finally answer the question:What do web pages that are well-positioned by Google have in common and what distinguishes them from lower ranking pages?

What factors are playing a role?Ranking Factors Overview 2013

You can find the most important factors in our overview of all rank correlation coefficients. These are all the factors we have analyzed and consider relevant. We have presented the relationship between Google search results and the various factors influencing it using the Spearman correlation - a high positive correlation coefficient occurs for a factor if higher ranking pages have that feature / or more of that feature, while lower ranking pages do not / or have less of that feature. In addition to providing an overview of the changes in correlation since last year, we have extended our analysis in 2013 to include many relevant new factors.

Top highlights of 2013:


Deeper Insights into the study:

1. Keyword links and domains have lost relevance

The importance of keywords in the URL / domain has significantly decreased as a ranking factor compared to 2012:
Keyword Correlations 2013
In our study, these two factors are considered the losers when  compared with last year, because the existence of keywords in the URL and/or the domain have lost their relevance. This also affects backlinks when it comes to plain text keyword links. So it looks as if the days of "hard keyword optimization" are over. Google now puts much more emphasis on natural link profiles. Hard keyword links have lost significant influence and can probably – when used excessively – even have a negative effect; for example, when Google updates its algorithm with features devaluing bad links. Wondering what else has been happening in the field of keywords? Check out the complete version of the Ranking Factors – Rank Correlation study.

2. Brands are the exception to many rules


Ranking-Faktoren: Brands
Last year, brands held a privileged position. This has also been confirmed in this year's study: for brands – and their websites – search engines do not seem to apply the same criteria as for other domains. For example, it seems as though Google considers it natural for brands to have comparatively more backlinks with the name of the brand in the link text alone – what we refer to as "brand links" – and still not be rated negatively.





3. Social signals continue to correlate very well with better rankings

Ranking-Faktoren: Zahlen Social
The tendency over the years has been very positive – and this year’s study confirms the trend that became evident as early as 2012: well positioned URLs have a high number of likes, shares, tweets and plus ones and specific URLs stand out in the top search results with a very high mass of social signals. On one hand this means that the activity on social networks continues to increase, on the other hand it means that frequently shared content increasingly correlates with good rankings.

4. Good content is always important: it comes to quality!

For our analysis of content features, we have increased the number of factors significantly over the previous year:
Content Factors Overview 2013
Ranking-Faktoren: Content Zahlen
Content factors correlate almost entirely positively with good rankings and were apparently – when compared with the previous year – partially upgraded. Good ranking URLs, to a certain extent have more text and a higher number of additional media integrations compared with 2012. A good internal link structure also appears to be an important quality attribute.

5. The number of backlinks remains immensely important

Ranking-Faktoren: Backlinks-Zahlen
Backlinks continue to be one of the most important SEO metrics. In this regard, little has changed over the years: sites with more backlinks simply rank better. And this is also the result of our ranking factor study in 2013. However, factors around this metric are subject to evolution: not only are the quantity of backlinks important, but increasingly so is their quality! The backlink profile is nowadays regarded as a kind of conglomerate of very diverse quality factors that we discuss in detail in the study.
Backlink Factors Overview 2013

6. On-page technology remains one of the basics

Ranking Factors 2013: On-page Technic



The on-page factors surrounding the technical side of building web sites have long been one of the basics of a good search engine ranking – and this will continue. Even more, it seems to be fulfilling certain on-page criteria is not about achieving a favorable ranking, rather, it is the opposite: it is simply negative for the rankings when web pages do not meet criteria. On-page factors are therefore considered more of a prerequisite for ranking higher in search results pages.
 Ranking-Faktoren: Zahlen Technik



The context of the Ranking Factors - Rank Correlation Study:

Search engines work with algorithms to evaluate websites by topic and relevance.
On this basis the search engines create a structure for the total of all pages in the search engine index, which finally results in a best possible ranking for users’ search queries. The criteria for the evaluation of websites and the production of this ranking are generally referred to as ranking factors. Please note the difference between correlation and causation in this case. We do not make any statements about causal effects between factors and rankings, but we analyze correlations: and the coexistence of a factor and rankings indicates some kind of relationship. For our study, we have undertaken a comprehensive data collection which enables the analysis of the Ranking Factors for Google USA in 2013 and also allows us to draw  comparisons to our analysis of the Ranking Factors in 2012.
This content is an overview of our detailed Ranking Factors – Rank Correlation 2013 study. The results are based on correlation and are not proof of any causal effects. To learn more:


Quickly Verify Your Site Ownership



Google Webmaster Tools, now provide you an easy access to verify the ownership of your website. As a new update, you can now quickly verify your ownership after adding and updating the websites tags through Google Tag Manager, using theContent Snippet code. The step wise process is explained below as per the google guidelines given in Google Webmasters Blog.

Step 1:

Before verifying your site, you need to first add it to the google webmaster tools. Add your site using Add site  from the top right corner of the  google webmasters tools homepage.

Step 2:

Open google webmaster tools homepage. Choose the website (web URL) that you need to verify and then click Manage sitefrom the right end. From the dropdown, choose Verify this Site.  It is must that you should have the account level permissions to view, manage and edit the site. Get your Website Audit Services here
 
Verify the Site








Step 3:

Once you click on Verify this Site, a verification page will open. Here select Google Tag Manager.
Google Tag Manager
 

Step 4:

As the final step, click Verify from the bottom of the page as shown in the image above. Now your site will be verified.
Hope this article helped you verifying your website. Follow my Google plus profile to get updates on SEO tactics and latest trends.



A B testing (sometimes called split testing) is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. You compare two web pages by showing the two variants (let's call them A and B) to similar visitors at the same time. Showing them to similar visitors and at the same timeis very important.
A/B testing in action

What is A/B testing?

All websites on the web have a goal - a reason for them to exist. News websites want visitors to click on ads, ecommerce websites want people buying products, personal blogs want people reading, interacting with, and finally respecting the author. Every website wants visitors converting from just visitors to something else. The rate at which a website is able to do this is its "conversion rate". Measuring the performance of a variation (A or B) means measuring the rate at which it converts visitors to goal achievers.Conversion rate optimization example

Why is A B testing useful?

Let's suppose you own an eCommerce store where you sell widgets. Your current conversion rate is 2% and average monthly traffic is 100,000 visitors. This means that in a month, you sell 2000 (2% of 100,000) widgets. Now if you want to increase sales by 10% to 2200 widgets, you'll have to increase the number of visitors by 10% to 110,000. To increase your monthly visitors, you'll have to run a marketing campaign or spend time on SEO. Assuming Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is $50, your total cost to acquire 200 new customers is $10000 ($50 x 200).
However, let's suppose you run an A/B test on your product pages. Visual Website Optimizer starts at $49 and you can have a test up and running in 30 minutes. After a week of running the test, you see an increase in conversions and sales to the tune of 107% or 41% or 27% . Depending on how much you increase your sales and conversion rate, the ROI case for A/B testing is massive, the kind that puts collective smiles on CMOs, CFOs and CEOs.

What can you test?



On the web, almost anything that influences user behavior can be A/B tested. Some of the elements that you can easily test:
  1. Headlines
  2. Sub headlines
  3. Paragraph Text
  4. Testimonials
  5. Call to Action text
  6. Call to Action Button
  7. Links
  8. Images
  9. Content above or below the fold
  10. Social proof
  11. Media mentions
  12. Awards and badges

How does A/B testing effect SEO?

Google cleared the air on the SEO implications of A/B testing in their blog post titled "Website Testing And Google Search".
The important bits from that post are:
  • No cloaking.
    Cloaking—showing one set of content to humans, and a different set to Googlebot—is against our Webmaster Guidelines, whether you’re running a test or not. Make sure that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content variant to serve, based on user-agent. An example of this would be always serving the original content when you see the user-agent “Googlebot.” Remember that infringing our Guidelines can get your site demoted or removed from Google search results—probably not the desired outcome of your test.
  • Use rel=“canonical”.
    If you’re running an A/B test with multiple URLs, you can use the Rel=“Canonical” link attribute on all of your alternate URLs to indicate that the original URL is the preferred version. We recommend using rel=“canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your intent in this situation. Let’s say you were testing variations of your homepage; you don’t want search engines to not index your homepage, you just want them to understand that all the test URLs are close duplicates or variations on the original URL and should be grouped as such, with the original URL as the canonical. Using noindex rather than rel=“canonical” in such a situation can sometimes have unexpected effects (e.g., if for some reason we choose one of the variant URLs as the canonical, the “original” URL might also get dropped from the index since it would get treated as a duplicate).
  • Use 302s, not 301s.
    If you’re running an A/B test that redirects users from the original URL to a variation URL, use a 302 (temporary) redirect, not a 301 (permanent) redirect. This tells search engines that this redirect is temporary—it will only be in place as long as you’re running the experiment—and that they should keep the original URL in their index rather than replacing it with the target of the redirect (the test page). JavaScript-based redirects are also fine.
  • Only run the experiment as long as necessary.
    The amount of time required for a reliable test will vary depending on factors like your conversion rates, and how much traffic your website gets; a good testing tool should tell you when you’ve gathered enough data to draw a reliable conclusion. Once you’ve concluded the test, you should update your site with the desired content variation(s) and remove all elements of the test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and markup. If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly. This is especially true if you’re serving one content variant to a large percentage of your users.

How should you A/B test?

The correct way to run an AB testing experiment (or any other experiment for that matter) is to follow the Scientific Method. The steps of the Scientific Method are:
  1. Ask a question: "Why is the bounce rate of my website lower than industry standard?"
  2. Do background research: Understand your visitors' behavior using Google Analytics and any other analytics tools running on your website.
  3. Construct a hypothesis: Adding more links in the footer will reduce the bounce rate.
  4. Calculate the number of visitors/days you need to run the test for:Always calculate the number of visitors required for a test before starting the test. You can use ourA/B Test Duration Calculator.
  5. Test your hypothesis: You create a site wide A/B test in which the variation (version B) has a footer with more links throughout the site.
  6. Analyze data and draw conclusions: If the test results in reduced bounce rate, then you can conclude that increased number of links in the footer is one of the factors that reduces bounce. If there is no difference in bounce, then go back to step 3 and construct a new hypothesis.
  7. Report results to all concerned: Let the others who're involved know of the test results and insights generated.
The Scientific Method of A/B testing


Visual Website Optimizer to A/B test

Conversion optimization with Visual Website Optimizer is incredibly easy. Essentially, it is just four simple steps.

1) Include the Visual Website Optimizer code snippet on your website

Including the code snippet means we are now ready to run the tests you create on your website. For further ease, we have plugins for Wordpress,Drupal and Joomla that make the process hassle free.Visual Website code snippet for A/B testing

2) Create variations using the WYSIWYG Visual Editor

Load your website in the Visual Editor and create any changes using the simple point-and-click interface. Advanced users can even make CSS and JS code changes.Visual Website Optimizer's WYSIWYG Editor

3) Choose your goals

All A/B tests have goals whose conversion rate you want to increase. These goals can be straightforward (clicks on links, visits page) or could use advanced custom conversion code.Conversion goals in Visual Website Optimizer

4) Start the test

And that's it, your test is ready to go live. Reporting is real-time so you can start seeing reports as soon as visitors arrive on a live test.Real-time reports in Visual Website Optimizer
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