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Share your results with PDF Reports

Wednesday, July 29, 2009 7/29/2009 01:34:00 PM

When I talk with users of Website Optimizer, they often tell me how exciting it is watching a test unfold and seeing the final results. That feeling you have after realizing that the new call to action section just sextupled your conversion rate is not just exciting, it's contagious, and you want to share it.

Previously, sharing your Website Optimizer reports could be a bit burdensome. You might have used a shared account or shared access through AdWords or exported the data to a spreadsheet, or maybe you even took screenshots of the reports. We released a new feature today that makes it easier to share your experiment results with others: PDF reports.

With a PDF report you can generate a full copy of the Website Optimizer reports for any experiment. This makes it easy to share reports within your company (and perhaps with your very own hippo), or with clients (and their hippos).

You'll find PDF reports on the Reports page for any Website Optimizer experiment.

Personally, I'm starting to build a collection of my best experiments. PDF reports look great framed on my wall.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome guys, will make it much easier to share data.

nicholas said...

Question on the sextupled case study. I find it possibly misleading, so I wanted to confirm.

Are they counting clickthroughs to the next page as conversions? Or actual booked flights? If it's the former, I think it's important to call that out.

Trevor Claiborne said...

Hi Nicholas,

A conversion is however you define it. The conversion in this case was getting to the second step of the purchase funnel. Still, the 591% lift in the second step led to more than doubling the number of booked flights.

A conversion is often a series of steps. Sure, you can focus just on getting people from Step 2 to purchasing, but you can start from the other end as well. If all you do is increase the percentage of folks people going from Step 1 to Step 2, you can still make a huge difference in the number of people making it to Step 3.

Dr. Pete said...

Excellent. Having just repurposed a GWO test into a Word doc by hand for a client, this is great news. I may have to go in and Photoshop some bars green once in a while, but other than that... ;)

nicholas said...

Thanks for the follow up Trevor. I appreciate it.

Anonymous said...

Nice, but i would prefer having a regular experiment (those without adwords) being shared to another person, like we do with Profile in Google Analytics.

Trevor Claiborne said...

Thanks for the feedback. There is a method to share using just Analytics, but it requires being an administrator on the account. Sounds like you just want to share with a user. That is something we hope to allow you to do in the future.

Unknown said...

This is terrific stuff!

One thing I'd *love* to see in these new reports is a screenshot of each variation. It would make it so much easier to explain the experiment to my colleagues. Especially the less technically-minded ones...

BFIR said...

I am still new with how to create this type of experiment, I hope to learn from you guys. I believe this type of experiment will be very helpful. I really like the idea.

Josh Lippiner said...

Wait - Im a bit confused with this report.

Does GWO automatically optimize my tests for me, so the best performing combination will automatically receive more traffic than the least or do I need to manually go in and select a winner?

If it's not automatically optimized, how long should I run a test for?

Trevor Claiborne said...

Hi Josh,

Website Optimizer splits traffic evenly to all combinations as long as the test runs. You can, optionally, have GWO automatically cut traffic to poor performing variations using the auto-disable feature.

In terms of how long a test needs to run, Website Optimizer tells you when you have a winner and this is signified by a green performance bar.

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