February 26, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As the winner of a contest sponsored by Google, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society received assistance from an outside consulting company to help it use Google’s free Website Optimizer to test the effectiveness of a page on its site.
The page — the home page for the charity’s Team in Training fund-raising program — featured a slide show of team participants running in marathons, climbing mountains, and competing in other sports events to raise money for the nonprofit organization.
The consulting company was concerned that the number of images made for a lot going on on the page. The busyness might distract visitors from the charity’s objective, which was to get people to sign up to receive e-mail messages from the charity, the company said.
So the consultants created two other, streamlined versions of the page, one that featured a video about the program and another that featured written testimonials by past participants.
For several days in September, the Google tool randomly directed Web-site visitors to the three versions of the Team in Training home page to see which was most effective in persuading them to sign up to receive more information — and to the consultants’ surprise, the existing site won.
Of the 1,708 visitors directed to the existing site, 326 signed up to receive more information, a conversion rate of 19.1 percent. Only 14.1 percent of the 1,664 people sent to the page featuring written testimonials and 13.9 percent of the 1,775 people sent to the page featuring the video signed up to receive additional information.
Testing the effectiveness of the Team in Training site was relatively easy because it has a single goal, says Todd Whitley, the charity’s vice president who oversees online marketing. Testing the organization’s overall home page would be more complicated.
For more information: Go to http://www.google.com/website optimizer/workout.
