I’ve made it a point in 2010 to expose as many of my colleagues and clients as possible to Google Website Optimizer. Anyone looking to improve conversion rates, Ecommerce revenue, customer satisfaction and web site user appeal really needs to sign up for a Google Website Optimizer account today and begin testing.

Surprisingly, Google Website Optimizer, and the concept of A/B or Multivariate testing is a tough sell. It’s not as easy as tagging each page of your site with Google Analytics, or creating a quick Ad Group with keywords and ads like you can with Google AdWords. With Google Website Optimizer, you have to bring in team members from different departments, or possibly, different vendors or organizations to plan, create / design images, write alternate text, tag pages, launch the experiment, analyze the results, and take appropriate action. This doesn’t include avoiding hurting the feelings of the person who designed the site or page and getting their cooperation (suggesting an experiment to improve a page or a site is not an easy psychological barrier to break down).

So I’ve put together a list of 9 solid reasons why you should use Google Website Optimizer on your site. If you want to use it on someone else’s site, use these reasons to convince them that it’s a great idea:

1. It’s Free, and there are no obligations. Let’s say you may become disatisfied with Google Website Optimizer. No sweat: simply remove the tags off of your site, and your involvement ends immediately. Let’s say that you love it and your conversion rates have sky-rocketed: you’ve spent $0 to get there (not counting any design work or man hours, obviously). You simply cannot beat “free”.

2. It focuses on Conversion Rate Optimization: The point of Google Website Optimizer isn’t to bring more traffic to your site. It’s to increase your conversion rates and improve your ROI from your online efforts. That means more money in your pocket.

3. It lets you create an unlimited number of experiments: Are you an “idea machine”, who constantly thinks of things to test or experiment with on your web site? Do you have multiple websites that you’d like to experiment with? GWO let’s you create as many experiments as you desire.

4. It’s extremely easy to install. Do you have six minutes? If so, you can create and launch a GWO experiment from start to finish. Simply copy and paste the few snippets of JavaScript code on your experiment pages, one snippet of code on your conversion page, and you’re done. Yes, it’s simply a copy and paste, something even I can do on a WYSIWYG editor.

5. It can handle robust multivariate experiments. Last year, YouTube ran a Google Website Optimizer experiment on their homepage with 1,024 different combinations. To date, that is the largest multivariate experiment ever created. Got ideas for a bigger one? GWO won’t disappoint you.

6. It automatically handles the experiment distribution. A frequent question that I receive is “Will I need to edit anything or change anything?”. Other than installing the basic snippets of code, the answer is no. No manual settings, no editing your destination URLs, no fancy programming. Just sit back and enjoy the results!

7. It displays your experiment to all sources of traffic. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to run a Google AdWords campaign in order to use Google Website Optimizer. All traffic – paid, organic, direct, or referring – will be exposed to your A/B or Multivariate experiment.

8. It features easy to read, downloadable reports. You don’t need to own a degree in Mathematics or Statistics in order to be able to interpret the results and take action based upon your results. You can also export your reports in a PDF, XML, CSV, or a TSV file format if you wish.

9. It allows “on-the-fly” experiment creation via an API. Google Website Optimizer is robust and offers its users an API that allows you to push experiments live without having to log-in to the Google Website Optimizer interface.

Bonus Reason:

10. It settles debates, squashes egos, and gives priority to the voice of your visitor. Google Website Optimizer is many great things as you’ve just read about. It’s also a fair and unbiased judge of your website’s pages. Don’t let inter-office disputes, arguments, or power plays dictate what your visitors receive on your site. Let your website visitors tell you what appeals to them and what they don’t like via the actions that they take. Do visitors convert at a higher rate when you use a green “Add To Cart” button versus a red “Add To Cart” button? Go green! Does your revenue increase when you use “15% off” instead of  “Mail-In Rebate”? 15% off for everyone! More sales with a blue background, and less sales with a white background? Blue it is!

Do yourselves a huge favor in 2010 and begin using Google Website Optimizer to improve your conversion rates!

If you’re an avid reader of our Analytics and Site Intelligence blog, you know by now that Google Analytics is very powerful, extremely secure, and flexible for many different types of web sites, industries, and web applications.

Last week, Google Analytics added a new layer of protection and clout in the web analytics industry by being approved by the United States Government. The United States Federal General Services Administration (GSA) has listed Google Analytics on its apps.gov website, which contain a listing of government-approved cloud computing applications.

Privacy and security matters are a top priority for Google Analytics, and being approved as a cloud computing application by the U.S. Government is a symbol of that hard work and dedication by the Google Analytics team.

On the Google Analtyics Blog, Dr. Phil Mui, Senior Product Manager, wrote: “We are very proud of and humbled by this listing and excited by the potential opportunities to serve US federal agencies and help them monitor and improve their website experiences. We understand that working with US Federal agencies includes a responsibility to protect our users and we would like to take this opportunity to further explain how seriously Google Analytics takes data security and protecting data privacy for our users, as detailed in our Terms of Service.”

This government approval makes MoreVisibility even more proud to offer a wide vareity of Google Analytics services to our clients, as well as being a Google Analtyics Authorized Consultant (GAAC).

Read the full article from the Google Analytics Blog here.

As a Web Analytics aficionado (and as a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant), we keep our ears and eyes open for all the goings on in the analytics industry. This of course means keeping up to date with the Google Analytics Blog, the best (and official) resource on the web.

They have been pretty busy so far in 2010, so if you’ve missed anything, here’s a list of what they’ve been blogging about so far:

Web Analytics TV with Avinash and Nick – Episode 4
Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski talk about tracking Social Media in GA, Advanced Profile Filters, and how anyone can become excellent at Web Analytics.

In Case You Missed It
Jeff Gillis from the Google Analytics team reminds to you read Avinash Kaushik’s “Top Ten Ways to Get Your Business Ready for the Holidays” Blog post over on the official Google Blog.

Google Analytics IQ: Make Sure You’re Searchable
Have you taken the Google Analytics IQ Exam? Have you passed it? Helen Huang from Google Analytics shows you how to make your test record public.

Clicks vs. Visits Revisited
The age-old issue in Web Analytics is revisited and thoroughly explained by Prissilia Kho and Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar.

Upcoming Seminars for Success in Australia
If you happen to be in the land down under, you won’t want to miss these great Seminar for Success conferences in February and March in Sydney and Melbourne, which is put on by fellow Google Analytics Authorized Consultants.

Raising the Bar on Google Analytics IQ
Alden DeSoto announces that it’s just gotten tougher to become Google Analytics IQ Certified.

Annotations Now Available in All Accounts
Annotations, a brand new feature announced at the very end of 2009, is now available in 100% of all Google Analytics accounts. Insert data in Google Analytics, and enjoy combining GA with your own “tribal” knowledge!

Google Analytics Even More Global
Six more languages have now been added to Google Analytics, bringing the total to 31 different languages to enjoy Google Analytics with.

Web Analytics TV with Avinash and Nick – Episode 5
This dynamic duo is at it again, this time going deep with a 25 minute video discussing a wide variety of Google Analtyics topics, which will really enrich and deepen your knowledge!

Quick Survey on the Help Center
Do you use the Google Analytics Help Center? Help Google help you by filling out this very quick survey, so that Google can improve this help section just for you.

Upcoming Google Analytics Workshop
Are you planning on being in the San Francisco / Bay Area in March for the SMX West Conference? If you are, then you won’t want to miss this great 2-part workshop by Feras Alhou, another fellow GAAC with E-Nor. If you haven’t registered for SMX West yet, you can use the discount code GA@SMX for 10% off!

Barely 5 weeks into the new year, and a lot of things are already happening! Stay tuned to both our blog and the Google Analytics blog throughout the year for more great news!

Let’s do something here on our Analytics & Site Intelligence blog that quite honestly we don’t do enough of: talk about pure statistics! Can you feel the excitement running through your veins? Oh wait, that’s only me.

As the Web Analytics industry becomes more and more mature, the requirement to understand basic statistical concepts becomes greater and greater. Awesome new features, like Google Analytics’ Intelligence report section and predictive modeling features from Google Insights for Search, beg the user to dive deep on their web data, segment it, grab insights, make a conclusion, and take meaningful actions.

Sure, you can do all that without knowing a lick about statistics, but chances are very high that you’ll start to get confused, lost, and overwhelmed along the way. Think of statistics like contractors think about a foundation for building a home – we all know what happens without a strong foundation!

Enter “Standard Deviation”, which is quite possibly (next to mean) the most important element in the field of statistics. Standard Deviation is the variance (another stat term!) from the mean (average) of a set of data.

Let’s say that the average football fan watches 3.5 hours of football a week, with a standard deviation of .5 hours (a half-hour). This means that – assuming a normal distribution (a third stats term!!) – most football fans (about 68% of them) will watch anywhere from 3 to 4 hours of football a week. Since the average is 3.5, and the standard deviation is .5, watching 4 hours of football a week is said to be “one standard deviation above the mean”. Conversely, watching 3 hours of football is said to be “one standard deviation below the mean”.

However, almost all football fans (which is about 95% of them, assuming a normal distribution), will watch anywhere between 2.5 and 4.5 hours of football, which is said to be “two standard deviations above or below the mean”. It’s two standard deviations above or below the mean, because 2.5 hours or 4.5 hours is two “.5’s” above or below our mean of 3.5.

In statistics, it is generally considered unusual if a particular data point (like, watching 9 hours of football) is above or below two standard deviations from the mean. Watching an average of 9 hours a week of football for the average football fan is way…WAY above 2s (two standard deviations), so this would be considered highly unusual for the average football fan.

What it means for you (the Web Analyst)?
Knowing what Standard Deviation is and how it’s used in Web Analytics will help you get an idea of just how important events that happen on your website could be. For example, in the new Intelligence Section in Google Analytics, you may see some alerts for an increase in Revenue from different regions:

If you notice on the left-hand side of the image, the revenue for this particular time period increased by 111% from North Carolina from the expected revenue. This is definitely significant (check out the significance bar on the right), as it’s about 3 or even 4 standard deviations above the mean! Perhaps your new PPC campaigns that were targeted to North Carolina were successful, and you can now duplicate that success everywhere else! Or maybe your email marketing strategy worked, and North Carolina residents responded so well that you can re-market to them in 1-2 months.

In that same image, the Revenue from the United Kingdom increased by 46%, which is about one or possibly two standard deviations above the mean. It’s not as significant of an increase as North Carolina’s, but still worthy of your attention nonetheless. Apply the same negative keywords or the same match types for your other international campaigns as well!

So now that you know what standard deviation is all about, use reports like Google Analytics’ Intelligence section to get a truer, deeper meaning of just how significant certain trends are that happen on your website, which will allow you to improve whatever it is that you are doing exponentially. You’ll be a better analyst for it!

Even to this very day, I am so surprised at just how much our Web Analytics industry has grown over the past couple of years. Now more than ever, website owners understand the need and the value of Web Analytics, so it’s a great time to be in this industry.

MoreVisibility is, of course, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (AKA: GAAC), which puts us right on the bleeding edge of the industry. And when it comes to growth, Google Analytics reigns supreme. Features like Intelligence, Custom Reports, Advanced Segments, Motion Charts, and many others have all been released relatively recently, and there should be a lot more to come in 2010!

Today I’d like to highlight five things that you may not know that Google Analytics does / can do. They are:

1. Goal Verification
Are you using regular expressions in your Goal URLs? For example, let’s say that you wanted to see all Goal Matches for your “PDF Download” Goal. Your goal – which is set-up to match all “.pdf” extensions – can be segmented by the full virtual pageview in this Goal Verification report within the Goals section. This can be very helpful for a lot of site owners, as they can have lots of PDF files available for download on their site:

2. Hourly Breakdown (How “far behind” Google Analytics is)
The trending graph in almost every report in Google Analytics defaults to a daily display, and most folks know how to modify the graph to show weekly or monthly graphing. What usually surprises people is that you can also switch to an hourly graph in some (not all) reports by clicking on the tiny clock symbol.

Tip: Ever wanted to know how “far behind” Google Analytics is in displaying your data? Switch your date-range to today and go into any report with an hourly trending graph option (The ones in the Visitors section will work). Then, graph by hour and scroll down the histogram to see where the data collection ends. Compare that to the current time and you’ll know how up-to-date Google Analytics is! You may be pleasantly surprised: I snapped this screen-shot at 9AM local time:

3. Hostnames (websites using my tracking code)
Staying in the Visitors section of reports is another gem. Click on Network Properties and then click on Hostnames to view a full list of every domain and sub-domain that has your Google Analytics Tracking Code on it. This can either be very relieving or very eye-opening to you, depending on what you expect to find . It’s a good idea to check out this report at least once – just to make sure any domains or sub-domains that are supposed to be excluded, are being excluded, or any sites that also have your tracking code are being tracked in that profile.

4. Keyword Positions
Did you know that Google Analytics can give you AdWords Keyword Positions, and metrics per ad position? This is definitely one of my favorite reports that lots of people don’t know about. Go to Traffic Sources, then AdWords, and then Keyword Positions. If your Google Analytics is properly synced to your Google AdWords account, you should have no problem being able to see visits per position with this nifty report. Click on a keyword on the left-hand side to view the visit position breakdown, and switch that drop-down menu which rests above the position table to “Revenue” for very revealing and insightful Ecommerce analysis:

5. Top Content by Title
Ever get tired of reading through your URLs in your Top Content report? Wish you could read actual words instead of the URL itself to figure out which page is which? Below the extremely popular Top Content report rests a Content by Title report that may be of interest to you. This is exactly the same thing as the Top Content report, except that it lists pages by the <title> meta-tag that you have within each page’s source code. Because it uses the <title> tag, and not the URLs, pages with the exact same <title> tag will be grouped together; as SEO best-practices dictates, you should make sure each page on your site has a uniquely written <title> tag.

There you have it – five things that you now DO know about Google Analytics!