Here’s a conversation between me and Garrett Todd, Vitruvian‘s Director of Website Optimization, as we prepare the outline for the Website Optimizer chapter of Google AdWords For Dummies 3rd edition. Listen online or click the download link to save the interview to your computer or iPod.

Download the interview in MP3 format.

On Friday, I shared my 4-stage testing protocol for AdWords ad split testing in this 60-minute webinar. 

Enjoy! Any questions or comments or disagreements or tangents, please share them in the Comments section.

Interested in being notified about upcoming Checkmate trainings, events, and free webinars? Register below.

Here are the slides and audio from today's webinar:

Ad Testing Protocol Slides (PDF)

Ad Testing Protocol Audio (MP3)

A recording of the webinar will be up in the next couple of days.

As always, questions and kudos and complaints are encouraged in the comments field of this post.

If the webinar inspires you to register for Camp Checkmate, well that was kind of the idea ;)

Register for Camp Checkmate here.

Why is Testing so Important?

Testing ad copy is the only "sure-thing" strategy in marketing.

You never know how well a message will work.

You never know how an offer will resonate with your market.

You never know exactly who is typing your most important keywords.

You can take educated guesses, but until you test those ads, you never know.

And testing can move you from a position of ignorance to one of surety quicker, cheaper, and more reliably than any other strategy I know.

So no matter how brilliant or intuitive you think you are at writing appealing messages, unless you're conducting smart and rigorous tests, you'll never reach your profit potential.

The Problem with Testing

Most people test mechanically, rather than thoughtfully.

"Hmmm, let's see. The first description line says, 'Wide selection of electric guitars.' Why don't I try 'Huge selection of electric guitars' and see if that does better?"

They're testing because they know they should be testing, rather than because they have unanswered significant questions about their ideal customer.

That's how I did it for years. And since I was always making slight improvements, I kept doing it that way.

For an example of the slow and idiotic way I tested when I first starting using AdWords, check out http://leadsintogold.com/genius. To save you some time, here's a short history of the evolution of my headline:

- Stop cold calling forever

- End cold calling forever

- Stop cold prospecting

- Cold calling ineffective?

- Cold calling not working?

Yeegads! Talk about walking around in circles…

I use this in Google AdWords For Dummies as an example of the power of testing, because as clueless as I was, I still quadrupled my CTR over the course of a year.

But now I know I could have accomplished that in a matter of weeks, rather than a whole year. And I could have gotten my CTR to 8-12%, rather than the 2.8% that made me so happy in 2003.

I knew enough to test. But I didn't know how to test, or how to generate ideas for testing.

Now I do, and on Friday 14 May 2010 at 1pm EDT, I'll be sharing 8 years of my mistakes and discoveries with you.

The Testing Webinar

In the webinar on Friday, I'll share my four-stage testing protocol.

If you're subscribed to the Camp Checkmate pre-Camp training series, you'll recognize the stages: visionary, strategic, emotional, and tactical.

(If you aren't yet subscribed, go to http://askhowie.com/ccm-training-signup to sign up.)

In this webinar, you'll discover how to put those concepts into practice in very simple and concrete ways.

So you're testing the right things, at the right time.

I touched on this concept briefly at the end of the last week's BOPzine, the AdWords Fable.

But on Friday, I go into it in a way you can begin to implement immediately.

Here's the registration link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/371743515

This webinar is part of the Camp Checkmate series – I developed the testing protocol to deal with the overwhelm some Camp Checkmate participants felt at suddenly having a dozen new ad ideas to test.

If you'd like to have that problem, you can register for the rest of the Camp Checkmate series, or just cut to the chase and register for Camp Checkmate Chicago – details below.

4 Days Left Before the Camp Checkmate Price Increase

If you're on the fence about attending Camp Checkmate in Chicago on June 10-11, this would be a good week to make up your mind. If you register by Saturday, May 15 at 5:33pm Eastern Time US, you save $800 off the regular tuition.

When you decide, go here to reserve your seat at Camp: http://CampCheckmate.com.
 

The King Seeks an Heir

Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters. As he was nearing retirement age and had spent his entire reign commissioning ballads about his greatness and generosity, he had not done much succession planning, and now had become somewhat desperate.

Which daughter should he choose to rule the land after him?

He decided to set his three daughters a task – whichever of them performed it best would win his undying admiration and the chance to move into the best room in the castle after he lit out for Boca Raton.

Here was the task he set: 

"In 4 weeks, bring me the sweetest peach in all the land."

The Daughters Search for Peaches

The eldest daughter, who was far too busy Facebooking to spend time searching all the land for a damn peach, waited 3.95 weeks and then ran to a nearby orchard, plucked a peach from the lowest branch of the nearest tree, and ran back up to the throne room for the royal tasting.

The middle daughter, who had a little more time on her hands since she was into Twitter, spent the four weeks tasting the peaches in all the local orchards. When she found the sweetest orchard, she tasted the peaches from the different trees, discovered the sweetest peach tree, and grabbed a peach from the lowest branch, and ran back up to the throne room for the royal tasting.

The youngest daughter, who knew from reading her fairy tales that she was expected to win and felt pressure to live up to expectations, spent the first week traveling up and down the kingdom, tasting random samples of peaches from each of the four peach-growing regions.

Once she determined that the southeastern region had, on average, the sweetest peaches, she spent the second week sampling each of the orchards of that region. 

Upon discovering that the Happy Peach orchard consistently produced the sweetest peaches in the southeast, she spent the third week tasting randomly selected peaches from each of the trees in this orchard.

When she had pinpointed the sweetest tree in the orchard, she spent the final week tasting peaches from the different branches of that tree. On the last day, she plucked the biggest, juiciest-looking peach from the winning branch and carefully brought it to the throne room for the royal tasting.

Which daughter would you put your money on?

What does this have to do with AdWords?

You may not care much about fictitious princesses and peaches, but I'm guessing you care a great deal about your business. So here's the question: which princess are you when it comes to testing the messages in your ads?

Which Princess are You?

Roughly 90% of business owners are the oldest princess. They write one ad, hoist it up the AdWords flagpole to see who salutes, and then think they're done with the process of ad creation. These are the people who often complain that online marketing doesn't work, that AdWords is just another scam, and that I should be cooked like a turkey for getting people's hopes up.

Another 9% of business owners are the middle princess. They understand the importance of testing, and they may be diligently testing all the time, but they're stuck in a rut that severely limits the improvements they can make. Instead of testing vastly different concepts, they're thinking of new ways to say "free shipping" and experimenting with commas and semi-colons and capitalization. 

At first, these tests can pay off, but over time, this attention to minutiae at the expense of big ideas leads to stagnation.

Only 1% of business owners (disclaimer: I'm making all these numbers up for dramatic effect; I have no idea what the true percentages are) are the youngest princess. Testing in a logical, methodical way. Virtually guaranteed to find, if not the sweetest peach or most appealing ad in all the land, at least one very near the top spot.

The youngest princess business owners are not afraid to wander far afield from their comfort zones. They don't rest on assumptions about who their customer is, what they want, why they want it, and how they want it. They research, make guesses, and test those guesses in a hierarchical fashion.

How to Test in AdWords

At Camp Checkmate, we spend one and a half days coming up with new ads, new landing pages, new headlines, new answers to objections, and new ways to appeal to our Ideal Customer. And if we just left it at that, everyone would go home happy. After all, they've totally busted through their creative rut, and they now have deep insight into their market.

But they don't really know how these new ideas will stack up against each other, and against their controls. Unlike other marketing media, where you can spend months and tens of thousands of dollars before you know if you have a sweet peach or a dud, in AdWords you can test quickly and cheaply.

That's why the last Camp Checkmate exercise gives campers a testing action plan: a framework for putting their ads into that optimizes the chances of finding the very best, most profitable ad.

1. Start with the Region

 In AdWords, the region is the Who. Who is searching for your keyword? Of that group, Who is your Ideal Customer?  Until you know your ideal customer, it's just silly to start fine-tuning language and offers.

2. Narrow in on the Orchard

The AdWord orchard is the What. What does your Ideal Customer want at the moment of search? A product? A service? A DIY manual? A review? Guidance and hand-holding? General information? A place to vent? Notice that the What will change as your Ideal Customer goes through the sales cycle. Don't think about What they want ultimately, but What they want right now, at the exact moment of this particular search.

3. Choose a Tree

 The AdWords tree is the Why. Why do they want What they want? Why are they searching? To solve a problem, or take advantage of an opportunity? To redeem themselves? To prove themselves worthy? To win love? To stop a feeling like frustration or confusion?

4. Select a Branch

The AdWords branch is the How. How do they want it? What are the features of the offer? Free shipping? In horizontal stripes? E-course or PDF download?

More Camp Checkmate Education – at Zero Cost

As part of my promotion for Camp Checkmate Chicago on June 10-11, 2010, I'm giving away much of my best training material. If you haven't yet signed up for the zero-cost pre-Camp Checkmate training series, you can still get in on the fun by clicking here.

You'll get Checkmate lessons in your inbox, and invitations to live training sessions and coaching calls. The deal is, I'm counting on the fact that enough people will say, "Wow, this free stuff is so good, I'd better go to Camp Checkmate where it's bound to be even better."

If you opt in right away, you'll have time to register for any of this week's live Checkmate webinars. There's one today, tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday – and on Friday April 30 the early bird pricing for Camp Checkmate flies away for the summer.

Hope to see you at Camp!

The AdWords Ball fall 2009 season starts October 7 at a computer and phone near you.

Read all about it:  http://askhowie.com/adwords-ball

Did you miss spring training? Catch a replay of the AdWords Ball web clinic

The Race for Porcelain

In 17th century Europe, Porcelain vases, pots, table settings, sculptures and other chatchkes (Chinese for “knick-knacks” ;) were all the rage.  Monarchs, churchmen and nobles postured for status and power in part by showing off the quality and quantity of bling they could buy, barter, or steal.

And porcelain, a hard, smooth, lustrous, non-staining earthenware product, was near the top of the “Look what I’ve got” heap. Europeans, for all their artistry and technological achievements, had no idea how to make the stuff. Every cup, bowl, and plate had to be imported from the Far East. And Portugal (and later the Dutch East India company) monopolized the trade routes, raising the prices even higher than they otherwise would have been.

Augustus the Strong, ruler of Saxony and a self-proclaimed porcelain addict, once traded 600 mercenary soldiers (“dragoons”) for 151 large vases, known ever after as the Dragoon Vases.

With everyone wanting porcelain and it being so difficult to come by in Saxony, it was only natural that lots of rich and powerful people invested in efforts by artisans, scientists, philosophers, alchemists and spies to discover the secret formula by which it was made.

The first approach, of course, was industrial espionage.  Hundreds of Europeans shlepped to the Far East to try to steal the formula for porcelain.

This failed spectacularly, as no Korean or Chinese potter would reveal their secrets to anyone but a trusted apprentice of 20 years, let alone to pale, greedy foreigners with no sense of personal hygiene.  Heck, it took 600 years for the art to spread from China to Korea – what did they expect?

Hundreds of years of experimentation also failed. It was not even known if the missing piece was an ingredient or a step of the recipe.

The Big Breakthrough – Not What You’d Think

Finally, the big breakthrough came to Saxony, not in the form of a flash of inspiration, but rather a speedier way of testing.

Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus invented a large spherical burning mirror, which, when pointed at the sun, could generate a small area of over 1500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Suddenly, would-be porcelain makers could try out dozens of experiments per day, instead of just one in the labor- and time-intensive kiln. They would use tongs to position the would-be porcelain piece in the center of the focused sunlight for a few minutes, put it to the side, and try another piece.

Within a few years, Tschirnhaus  and a colleague, Johann Friedrich Böttger, had solved the riddle. The missing ingredients included high heat and addition of a reduction agent. As much as anything else, it was the ability to split test quickly and inexpensively that led Tschirnhaus and Böttger to their discovery.

Which brings us to AdWords…

And that’s what I want to talk about today – your ability to achieve breakthroughs via speedy testing.  Most businesses never test anything.   That’s incredible, given that even modest tests reveal huge potential for improvement.  Take this example, for example:

See how the difference of just one word (powerful vs. effective) led to a cost per lead reduction of 35%?

Without testing, my career as an online marketing educator would never have gotten off the ground.

AdWords: Your Personal Giant Burning Mirror

Google AdWords is the ultimate source of traffic for testing.

You can test ad messages in a week or two. If your traffic stream is robust, you can tweak your landing pages and get more leads and sales in under a month.   You can pay for 200 clicks, knowing in advance how much they’re going to cost you.

And using AdWords conversion tracking, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer (all zero-cost), you can perform scientifically valid and statistically powerful tests that simply wouldn’t have been possible even 7 years ago.

If you’re using AdWords and not testing for continuous improvement, you’re missing out on the very best feature of the whole program.

Here’s the thing: the money you’re losing by not testing (or not testing correctly) could be the difference between making it or not making it online. And it’s so easy to improve, once you get in the habit of always asking, “Can I do better?”

Increasing profits is often hard work – cutting costs, developing new lead sources, developing new product line and service offerings.

Getting your ads to deliver twice the traffic – or four times, or eight (these numbers are not uncommon) – is relatively easy. Especially if you haven’t tested yet: chances are, a lot of improvements are “low hanging fruit.”

And once you catch the testing bug, via ad testing, your next stop is Website Optimizer, the free Google tool that helps you improve the performance of your web pages.

Talk about highly leveraged activities – if you can double your site conversion rate, you’ve doubled your sales. And more than doubled your profits, since you’re not spending a single additional cent on Google traffic.

AdWords Ball

In AdWords Ball, the course that starts October 7, I show you how to become a testing master.  How to design your online business for inevitable improvement. A never-ending process of giving yourself a raise whenever you feel like it.

If you’re spending more than $700/month on AdWords, then AdWords Ball is a no-brainer, in my humble opinion.

If I’m wrong, you get a refund – that’s how confident I am in the methods of testing and tracking that I’ve developed.

Find out more, and register, here: http://askhowie.com/adwords-ball

No giant burning mirror required…

(Not sure if AdWords Ball is the right course for you – email support AT askhowie DOT com to request a quick conversation with me about the course, your business, and whether it’s a good fit.)

Last month I did a minor overhaul of my office.

I moved the piles of illegible notes, dead AA batteries, dirty bowls, USB cables that I have way too many of and can’t bring myself to toss, and last year’s taxes out of the office and into the trash, recycling, kitchen sink, trash, and attic crawl space, respectively. I removed all the non-essentials from my desk. And I brought in a monster bookcase to hold all the stuff that almost has a home.

The question was, where should the bookcase go? Facing west or north? Both had advantages and disadvantages, but the main thing was going to be the feel of the room. The Feng of the Shui, you might say.

It turned out that getting the thing into my office at all was a minor miracle, as well as a testament to how much my neighbors really don’t mind me so very much. It took six of us – four doing the work and two offering advice and commentary – to get that sucker into the office at all. What with low ceilings, tight corners, and the fact that I had forgotten to prepare the rest of the furniture to accept the newcomer, we all breathed a sigh of relief when the bookcase was in place. Any place. "Hey, wait guys, what about trying it on this other wall? Guys? Guys? Hello… Is anybody out there?"

No, once it was in position (on the east wall, next to the window, there it stayed. It’s not bad. It looms a little, but in a supportive "Why don’t you write the newsletter instead of uploading TED videos to Facebook?" sort of way.

Here’s a photo:

(Note the prominent display of my matching Three Mile Island Unit 2 Dedication Paperweights.  Yes, I was in attendance. No, I don’t glow in the dark. And no, they’re not going on eBay any time soon…)

 So until I do an awful lot of favors for a whole bunch of neighbors, that bookcase is staying exactly where it is. And the more stuff I put on its shelves, the less likely I am ever to move it again.

What about the furniture on your landing page?

Contrast that bookcase with the elements of your landing page. The one that you spend all that money sending visitors to. The one that isn’t converting as well as you’d like. How Feng is its Shui?

You know all about the value of testing, but are you doing it on your landing pages? Where it’s so much easier than in the real world. Where you just need a webmaster, not a bunch of friends and a hand truck.

So let’s talk about some tests you can run having to do just with the placement of your stuff. Don’t worry about copywriting. Just where things go on the page.

Watch First, Test Second

First thing is, know what your visitors are already doing on your landing page. Throw up some analytics. Google Analytics is quite good, and quite free. It’s already in your AdWords account.

I like Crazy Egg for visually friendly analytics. I especially like their Confetti feature, that shows me where people are clicking on my page. I can view that info in aggregate, by keyword, by time to click, or by browser. Here’s an example of the early results of a test of my home page:

Eighteen clicks, and 13 of them occurred between 30 seconds and 2 minutes on the site. With info like this, I can figure out if the links and forms and BUY buttons are in the right place, or if my visitors are bailing before getting to the good stuff.

Once you can see what the problems are, then set up tests that aim to overcome them. The first iteration of my home page featured a giant "Buy the Book" promo near the top right. I wasn’t getting many opt-ins, and since I make about $0.90 royalty per book, it wasn’t the best use of that real estate. It wasn’t even what most people wanted to do, as I found out from Crazy Egg:

As you can see, nobody was trying to buy the book. Nobody was signing up for my free first chapter, and everybody wanted free advice from the chat box. So I removed the chat box (if you want free advice, you now have to pay for it ;), removed the book promo, and changed the offer for the opt-in.

Ask Your Visitors to Complain

I’m using another tool to find out what’s stopping my visitors from opting in, or signing up for Gold Key status, or joining the Ring of Fire, or purchasing the Look Over My Shoulder (LOMS) videos, or whatever. It’s a tool called Kampyle – you can see it sitting quietly in the top right corner of this page, like Charlotte waiting for Templeton rat to bring her some words. Click the "Give Feedback" icon and you’ll see how it works. Feel free to try it and let me know what you think of the site.

Test to Remove Obstacles to Conversion

Your visitor will convert when they’re  ready, willing, and able. Your usability testing and feedback gathering should give you an idea of which of the three will make the biggest difference.

Ready

Are your visitors ready to take the action you want them to take? Do they have enough information? Enough trust in you? Enough confidence in your product? Are they at a stage where they can benefit from your product or service, or do you need to meet them halfway?

If not, what do you need to add to your site flow to make offers congruent with their current state?

Willing

Do they want to do it? Have you explained the benefits? Have you done the cost-benefit analysis for them? Have you made it clear how you’re different and better than their other options?

Able

Can they do it on your site? Can they find the right links and buttons? Does everything work? Do pages load quickly enough to keep their attention? Is it easy to navigate your site, or do you need to offer a training course to users?

The usability community has a buzzword, "user friendly." Forget that – aim for what my friend Mike Psenka of Ethority terms "user ridiculously obvious."

Then Test

Start with simple curiosity: "Where should the BUY button go, here or there?"

Then create two versions of the page. Use Google’s free website optimizer to run the test (it’s really easy). Send some traffic, and you’ll discover one of two things:

1. One version is clearly superior to the other.

2. Not much difference, which means either the element you were testing doesn’t matter very much, or the differences were too small to affect behavior.

Either way, you’ve learned something. Wash, rinse and repeat, and pretty soon you’ll have a landing page that contributes mightily to your bottom line.

Compared to moving a monster bookcase, website improvement is easy. And you don’t even have to buy your neighbors a beer afterwards.

Product Links (stuff you should get)

1. The Ring of Fire

Online community, monthly calls, ready-response forum. Get your AdWords questions answered quickly. Get reviews of your keyword strategy, landing pages, and ads. Hundreds of dollars of consulting for as little as $20/month. Sign up now to get free access to an upcoming AdWords Quick Start webinar series ($147 value).

2. Look Over My Shoulder AdWords (LOMS) Success Videos

35+ (and growing) videos keyed to AdWords For Dummies, most between 2 and 5 minutes. Discover exactly how to do all the important stuff. Get confused by reading? Watch the videos and slash your learning curve. Learn more…

Bonus Quotes (for reading this far)

"An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You would never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."
- Mitch Hedberg

"My neighbor has a circular driveway… he can’t get out."
- Stephen Wright

"Why is there so much controversy about drug testing? I know plenty of guys who would be willing to test any drug they could come up with."
- George Carlin

"I saw a product on late night TV. It said, ‘You can water your hard-to-reach plants with this product.’ Who would make their plants hard to reach?! ‘I know you need water, but I’m gonna make you hard to reach. I will throw water at you. Hopefully they invent a product before you shrivel and die.’"
- Mitch Hedberg

"Last week I helped my friend stay put. It’s a lot easier’n helpin’ ‘em move. I just went over to his house and made sure that he did not start to load sh*t into a truck."
- Mitch Hedberg

How do we figure out the best price for our products and services? Is it based on what our competitors are charging? What we want? What are customers are willing to pay?

What about testing to find the right price? Is that sound business practice? Sleazy opportunism? Respectful and curious marketing?

And is the goal always to maximize profit? What if that’s not the goal?

Here are my current musings on the topic:

If you listen with your eyes closed you won’t be bothered by the Japanese horror-movie non-syncing of sound and lips…

A word from our sponsor (me): Discover the new "recession-busting" pricing for the Ring of Fire: get AdWords support, tutorials, coaching, breaking news and support for as little as $20/month. Learn more here…

I started shaving in 1979, at the age of 14 (see this photo of my horrendous mustache from my 9th grade graduation). Aside for a couple of years’ flirtation with beards (see this photo from a winter trip to the Florida Keys in 1991), and the "online marketing consultant Fridays" where I couldn’t be bothered, I’ve shaved pretty much every day over the past 30 years. By conservative reckoning, that’s close to 10,000 shaves.

And I still suck at it.

I cut myself. I miss patches of bristle the size of a compact disc. I get astringent aftershave up my nose and in my eyes. I produce ingrowns and razor burn on my neck by scraping too deeply in the wrong direction.

So what’s up with that?

The answer can be found in the following video, taken from the Season 5 Premiere of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The episode, in which the Fab Five crown "Mr. Straight Guy," included a shaving competition.

Competitive Shaving

The minute I started watching, my entire shaving worldview shifted. For the first time in my life, I saw shaving as an activity at which improvement was not only possible but desirable. My testosterone started pumping, and I felt the old competitive instincts flexing their muscles. "I could be good at this," I thought to myself as I watched the Straight Guys attempting to de-hairify themselves in 90 seconds. "Look at that guy’s brush technique," I excitedly exclaimed inwardly. "Way too much shoulder, not enough wrist."

The details of how to shave, as provided by Queer Eye’s Manscaping Expert Kyan Douglas, have provided valuable guidance as I go from shaving clutz to Olympic chin deforester. But the details are nothing without the twin engines of performance improvement: Intention and Attention.

Intention

As soon as I heard the words "shaving competition," I bought into the concept that I could improve my shaving ability.

Most website owners don’t even think about their landing pages, home pages, and interior pages as improvable. They just are. They just sit there. Just like I shaved without having the intention to shave better for all those years.

So here’s my call to action: you can significantly improve your website!

You can get better results by improving your headlines, header graphics, font and text size, color scheme, form design, and several dozen other elements. And let me be specific here. By better results I mean more leads and sales. More money. For exactly the same AdWords spend. For exactly the same effort.

Once that intention to improve throbs within you, you’re halfway there.

The second half – the second engine of performance improvement – is Attention.

Attention

The world is constantly giving us feedback about every detail of our existence. Most of it gets ignored. Take a second now to prove this to yourself. Pay attention to the way you’re sitting right now. Is there an adjustment you can make to be more comfortable? Notice your breathing. Is it shallow or deep? Wouldn’t a nice deep breath feel really good right now? How are your shoulders? Tense and up around your ears, or relaxed and hanging? Which would feel better?

We get feedback about the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the looks we give others, the perfumes and colognes we put on, the cars we drive, the sounds we make while we eat soup, and all the rest of it. And we pay attention to feedback that’s important to us (like did that joke we told get laughs or cold stares), or that’s so loud we can’t ignore it anymore (like an illness after years of neglecting our health).

But attention is habitual. So just having the intention to improve my shaving, or your website, or anything else, isn’t going to make it happen.

We need to create a new attention habit. To train our brains to notice the feedback that’s relevant to our attempts to improve. As I stroke up around the neck, I need to pay attention to the pressure and the angle and the sensation and the subsequent stream of blood or lack thereof. I can’t be focused on the BOPzine I have to write later today, or the thing I forgot to fax yesterday, or where we’re going on vacation in July. I need to be present with the reality of the shaving.

Website Testing Mechanics

The simplest tool for website testing and improvement is Google’s Website Optimizer. You can find it as a tab in your AdWords account.

Optimizer is Google’s ultra-simple split testing tool. All you need to get started is a control page, a test page, and a "success" page. That is, your original landing page is the control, and some variation of the landing page is the test page. The success page is where your prospect ends up after they do the thing you want them to do.

If you want them to buy something, then the success page says something like, "Thank you for your purchase. If we have any of this item in stock, we’ll probably send one to you in a few days, when we get around to it."

If you collect leads, the success page reads, "Thank you for giving us your email address and other sensitive information, which we will now sell to the highest bidder. We’ll also start bombarding you with obnoxious and irrelevant offers until you die or cancel your email address."

Optimizer will prompt you to enter the URLs of these three pages, and then give you snippets of code to place on each. (A competent webmaster can complete the code-placement process in about 84 seconds, so don’t let them overcharge you. Heck, even I can do it in under 10 minutes, although I do require a mild sedative to complete the task.)

Here’s an embarrrassing look at one of my tests, which has proved inconclusive so far:

The original page has generated two sales out of 170 visits, and the test page has lead to three sales from 176 visits. Gee, maybe neither page is doing its job…

Strategic Pre-Testing Questions

Before you jump into the mechanics of testing, start by setting your intention and marshalling your attention. What are you curious about? What decisions did you make when you built the site that you might want to address again?

Testing expert Richard Mouser puts it this way:

In the frenzy of getting a website built, there are always compromises.  Let’s face it, no one has the time to create the perfect website first time around (if ever).

So think back to that time and remember any time you said or thought:
•    OK, that’s good enough for now
•    Not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess it works
•    We don’t have time to do it over again

Listen, you did the right thing at the time.  It’s better to have an imperfect website than no website at all.  So don’t beat yourself up, just think about that time and write down all the things that you were not 100% satisfied with.

Browse through your website and see if that jogs your memory.  Write down every idea, and carry that paper with you to capture more ideas whenever or whenever they come.

Once you set up your first test, make sure you install attention cues into your work day. Subscribe yourself to an autoresponder that reminds you to check the results every 2 days. Put action items in your calendar system. Start testing with a buddy, and encourage each other.

After you get your results and realize that split testing is the easiest and most elegant way to give yourself a pay raise, you won’t need those structured reminders, any more than I need a reminder that there’s a bar of Gearhart’s Venezuelan Dark Chocolate with Crystallized Australian Ginger in the green drawer where I keep my wallet and keys (in case a thief finds the drawer, I’m hoping the wallet and car keys will distract them from the chocolate).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shave for the 9,874th time:

What have you improved after a long plateau by applying Intention and Attention? Post your answer to comments.

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Whenever you encounter twins in a movie or novel, you know there’s trouble brewing. From the Biblical account of Esau and Jacob to the Shakepearean mishaps in "A Comedy of Errors" (where there are two sets of twins with identical names, Antipholis and Dromio, which is why so many people get stoned before watching the Bard), to the wily conniving of Hallie and Annie in The Parent Trap (or Sharon and Susan, if you’re into the 1961 Hayley Mills original), duplication has always brought in its wake confusion and opportunities for mischief.

(Now don’t get offended if you’re a twin – I’m talking about the other one, not you ;)

Duplicate Content Penalty

Google doesn’t like twins much either. Or triplets. Or octuplets.

That is to say, Google penalizes web pages that it deems to be near-exact copies of existing web pages. It won’t let them appear in search results.

You can understand why. If I have a page that ranks highly for "game show buzzer" (don’t ask ;), Google doesn’t want me making 9 more copies of the page and dominating the entire first page of search results.

So Google rewards the first page it finds with all the search engine mojo it deserves, and slaps all subsequent copies with Duplicate Content Penalty.

And that, boys and girls, is about all I know about Search Engine Optimization. And all I thought I needed to know.

Until…

The AdWords Quality Score Duplicate Content Penalty

Google decided to apply the very same rule to AdWords landing pages. This means, if you’re split testing landing pages to find the very best one, you may end up with Poor quality scores for all the keywords pointing to that landing page.

And the landing page will look perfect. The right title tag, the right content, the right format, everything perfect.

Except that it’s a copy of a page already indexed by Google.

How to Avoid the Twin Sin

If you haven’t yet made this mistake, here’s how to avoid it:

1. If you have a landing page that’s already indexed by Google (that is, it shows up on the left "organic side" of search results), test it as a destination URL in AdWords to make sure you’re getting a good quality score for your important keywords. If not, fix the title tag, header tags, content, inbound and outbound links, etc. All the basic SEO stuff we AdWords people have been forced to learn. (See Grade Grubbing with Google for details.)

2. Add the following meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags at the top of every new page you create to test against the original:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

How to Atone for the Twin Sin

What if you’ve already made the mistake? And your quality score is miserable, and you can’t afford clicks, and you don’t know what to do to improve that landing page any more?

Google, in their infinite benevolence, has given us mortals a chance to receive absolution for the Twin Sin. We can petition the Mountain View Olympians to remove pages from its index. Here’s how:

Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and sign in with your Google account. Add your site and get it verified by adding tags or a tiny HTML file to the site (so Google knows you have FTP access to it and therefore can be assumed to be the owner).

Then, from the Dashboard, select "Tools" and click the "Remove URLs" link.

Then select + New Removal Request and enter the URL of the page you want removed from the index (make sure you don’t choose a page that’s got good search engine rank right now).

The best practice is to index your best-performing landing page, since that’s the best place to send organic traffic (remember, that kind of traffic is free!).

Then add the "no index" tag to all the new landing pages you’re testing against the original. When you find a winner, change the original page to reflect the improvements. That original page is still indexed, recently updated (which Google loves), and a more effective sales tool. And then you repeat the process with your next round of split tests, always keeping the new pages off the Google radar with the "no index" tag.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, my evil twin wants to go eat some cake for breakfast.

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Bonus Quotes

When I was born the doctor took one look at my face, turned me over and said, "Look, twins!" 
~Rodney Dangerfield

When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic. 
~Steven Wright