Optimize your e-commerce store with Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is a free set of tools that can help you increase the effectiveness of your Web pages. Applied to your ProductCart-powered e-commerce store, this means, for example…

• Figuring out what works best on your home page
• Changing the way frequently viewed pages look to minimize the bounce rate. For example, think of pages like “Best Sellers”, “New Arrivals”, “Specials”, etc.

The bounce rate is the rate ( = percentage of total visits) at which people see the page and leave. For example, an 80% bounce rate on a certain page means that 80% of visitors to the page leave, without clicking through another page on your Web site or Web store. This important statistic is readily available in you Google Analytics Web traffic reports. Google Analytics is fully integrated with ProductCart.

Your e-commerce store includes a number of pages that are a good candidate for optimization using Google Website Optimizer. However, a sophisticated shopping cart program like ProductCart contains dynamic code that makes the integration with a system like Website Optimizer less accessible than when using a simple HTML page.

Shopping cart pages must be “prepared” for use with Website Optimizer. This section of the ProductCart WIKI is a work-in-progress as new pages will be released for use with Website Optimizer over time.

We modified home.asp to include areas for Google Website Optimizer Control Script and two areas to test different content for page optimization. Of course, you can add more once you understand how the process works.

• Download the edited files (04.22.08)
  The ZIP includes the home page, best sellers, and new arrivals (see at the bottom of this page for details).
• See an example on the Early Impact E-commerce Software store
  Refresh the page to see new versions of the top area of the page being displayed.
• READ below to add your own custom, Website Optimizer Control Script and Tracking Script (both are page specific)

Create a new Google Website Optimizer account or log into your existing one. Start a new multivariate experiment.

• You can name it anyway you like: e.g. “My e-commerce store home page”
• The URL will be the URL to your e-commerce storefront, ending in “home.asp” (the file that will be part of the experiment)

Now, open the file home.asp that you have downloaded above with your favorite HTML editor. There are two sections that you need to edit before running the experiment.

First, locate the following section and place your Control Script there:

'*******************************
' Google Website Optimizer
' Control Script - START
'*******************************
%>
<!-- REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR CONTROL SCRIPT -->
<%
'*******************************
' Google Website Optimizer
' Control Script - END
'*******************************

Secondly, locate this section at the bottom of the file, and insert the “Tracking Script” there.

<%
'*******************************
' Google Website Optimizer
' Tracking Script - START
'*******************************
%>
<!-- REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR TRACKING SCRIPT -->
<%
'*******************************
' Google Website Optimizer
' Tracking Script - END
'*******************************
%>

Note that tracking script for both Google Analytics and Website Optimizer, which look very similar, can coexist. You do not need to alter the script used in your footer.asp file, if you use Google Analytics.

We have added two sections to the home page, which you will be able to alter via Website Optimizer.

1. The main headline at the top, whose text is normally a text string that is fed from the file “includes/languages.asp”
2. The page description, whose content is normally set via the “Manage Home Page” feature in the Control Panel

Add the conversion script at the bottom of pc/orderComplete.asp, before the include statement that loads the file “footer.asp.

<!-- Add the conversion script here -->
<!--#include file="footer.asp"-->

Once you have uploaded the edited pages back to the “pc” folder of your ProductCart-powered e-commerce Web site, use the “Validate Pages” tool at the bottom of the “Install and validate JavaScript tags” in your Google Website Optimizer account to make sure that all the code has been properly configured. The page should validate correctly and you should see the following confirmation screen.

Next, you can define how you want the two sections of the home page to change. Google Website Optimizer will then serve different variations to your store visitors, and you will be able to decide which ones perform better, removing the non-performing ones.

The first page section defined in home.asp to be controlled by Website Optimizer corresponds to the H1 tag that creates the page headline. By default, it reads:

<h1>Our featured products this month include...</h1> 

On our Early Impact Software Store home page - for example - we created a new variation to be served as an alternative H1 tag. The code that we entered on Website Optimizer, replacing the default one, is:

<h1>Increase sales by listing products on eBay</h1>
<h2>Use the new eBay Add-on to easily list your store products on eBay</h2>

You can create as many variations as you like, and - as you can see - you don't have to replace the default content with a new version of the same. It can be something completely different (e.g. we added an H2 tag below the H1 tag).

The same is true for the page description section. Here the default description is whatever Page Description you added under Marketing > Manage Home Page.

You are now ready to launch your experiment. You can see a working example of this on the Early Impact E-commerce Software store. Refresh the page to see different versions of the page headline and page description.

We have created special versions of the home page, best sellers page, and new arrivals page. You can download them below. They are all structured just like the home page described below. That is, for each page we have defined two page sections that you can control via Website Optimizer.

Download the edited files (04.22.08)

Download the file, unzip it, and use the files in the ProductCart_Standard folder.

Download the file, unzip it, and use the files in the ProductCart_Apparel_Add-on folder.