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Web Content 2007: Optimize Content with Google Tools

In addition to being a great search engine, Google provides a number of useful tools that allow you to optimize your sites, measure traffic, tweak content, and ultimately drive more traffic to your destination.

Adam Howitt’s presentation, Using Google Tools to Optimize Content for Business Results, delved right into three of Google’s hosted tools:

• Google Analytics is a useful service that allows content providers to measure success with traditional web analytics like visits and page views, as well as ecommerce conversions such as sales or subscriptions.

From the tool’s dashboard, you can drill down into deeper data which can be used to optimize content, determine where visitors are leaving your website.

• Google AdWords allows you to run and refine advertising campaigns and test different variations to drive traffic to specific content on your site.

• Google Website Optimizer is a testing tool within AdWords. It gives content producers the ability to experiment with different content to determine which content delivers the best results (based on how you measure success). Content producers can set up variations of text, images, style sheets, or essentially anything on a web page and have Google randomly serve combinations of that content to a small group of visitors. Those combinations are then tested and ranked according to the most conversions.

Howitt recommends experimenting with these three tools on one of your pages. After seeing your traffic with Analytics, test variations of your content with Website Optimizer and then drive traffic via AdWords.