How to conduct A/B testing with Google Optimize

- [Brad] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole and today I wanna talk about using Google Optimize for A/B testing. Google Optimize is a newer Google product and it lets you create and test website variations to see how these changes will influence your customer's behavior. This is very similar to Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer. But what's great is the basic tool is completely free, so it's easy to use and it also integrates instantly with your Google Analytics data. This gives you a complete picture as to what's going on. Plus, you can tweak anything with a few clicks on the mouse, your text, images, the layout, and you can do this all for any segment of customers. You can keep your testing simple by tweaking headlines on your page, or you can consider complete layout changes. And once your testing is complete, you can even deploy the winning variant. Now, I wanna show you a few basics on Google Optimize so you can decide if it works best for you. You'll start out by visiting optimize.google.com. Now, you need to log in with a Google account, and once you've done that, you'll simply select Get Started. Here you can opt into any emails, select your account settings, and agree to the terms and conditions. Once you're in, you'll arrive at this dashboard. And here on the right-hand side, it's going to explain the setup of your container. The container is all of the tests that you will be running. You can have multiple experiments all within one container. Typically, you'd use a container for your brand or your website. Now, notice this checklist explains all the steps. You need to create the account and container, which we've done here. Then we'll create the experiment. And then we need to link it to Google Analytics and start that experiment. The first thing we can do is select Create Experiment in the upper right-hand corner and we'll give it a name. I'll call this Testing Homepage Headline. And we can do this for explorecalifornia.org. And we'll select the type of experiment. In this case, it'll be an A/B test. I'll choose Create in the upper right-hand corner and now we have our initial experiment built. So the first thing that we need to do is create a variant. So we are going to compare the test versus the original. So I'll choose Create Variant. We can give this a name. In this case, I'll leave it as Variant 1 and choose Add. To start making the changes that we wanna test, we'll select where it says 0 changes, choose Save And Continue to save our changes, and then we'll need to install an extension for Chrome in order to develop these changes. I'll go ahead and go through the steps to install the extension. You'll see it appear in the upper right-hand corner and now we have the extension installed. I'll close this, I'll select 0 changes again, and now we're going to see the homepage that we added before and we simply need to select the elements that we wanna change. It's that easy. So here where it says Explore our world your way, I can choose to edit the element, I'll select Edit text, and I can simply type in what I'd like to try. Once I've made the change, I'll choose Done in the bottom right-hand corner and Save in the upper right-hand corner. We'll then select Done. And just like that, we now have set up an A/B test that we can run to compare that headline versus the original. Now, there's all kinds of additional settings that you can change, such as the variant weight, how much traffic you'd like to drive. And then you'll need to set up your objectives and targeting, and to do this you'll need to link your Google Analytics property, which you can do by following the instructions on the right-hand side. Now, I'm not going to continue walking you through the rest of this. It's fairly straightforward. You'll set up Google Analytics, once it's connected, you'll simply start the experiment. Google will automatically run it for a necessary amount of time until you have statistically significant results, and they'll tell you which one wins. From here, you can continue to build up all kinds of A/B testing in a quick and efficient manner in order to optimize and improve your marketing pages. Thanks for checking in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you, so connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter via @bradbatesole and let me know what you're A/B testing. I'll see you next week.