Website Optimizer for Nonprofits, Part 1: What is Website Optimiser?

As a non-profit, your website may be the first and last point of contact people have with your organisation. So how do you ensure you are getting the right message across? More importantly how can you improve your website so that it meets it intended purpose more effectively?

The answer is Google's Website Optimiser.

Let's say you want to see an increase in donations each month through your website.

How can you improve these goal conversion rates ?
How do you know what to change on your website?

We'll answer these questions, as well as get into the specifics of Google Website Optimiser over the course of this series.

To begin, let's go over exactly what the Website Optimiser is.

The Google Website Optimiser

Google's website optimiser allows you to effectively measure and test different versions of your website. By making small changes to your websites copy, headline, imagery or even design you can see what changes to your website have the biggest impact on your end goals.

One of the best things about the Google Website Optimiser is that its absolutely free.

Think about the goals you have for your organization's website and how you might rework your website to better achieve those goals. In particular think of the path a user would generally follow to reach your goal page(s).

Is the process clear and straight forward? Are there any areas which could be less ambiguous? Do you and your colleagues agree with how the website is set up? Perhaps you have varying opinions? You can test these opinions and let your website users decide how your pages should be structured.

For anyone who has ever had heated discussions with their colleagues / webmaster / boss about web page layout, design or content the Google Website Optimiser might be able to help you end those heated discussions, by letting the user decide what is best.

Coming back to goals, so what do we mean by goals and goal pages?

Some non-profit organisation website goals might include:

- Receiving donations
- Increased awareness / downloads of information booklets
- Increased attendance at events / conferences
- Increased subscriptions to your organisations newsletter

Take some time to think about the goals you have for your website and how you'd like to see it improve. We'll continue this series with Part 2: Configuring Website Optimiser for Nonprofits, and you'll see how you can configure Website Optimiser for your goals.

Meanwhile, our Seminars for Success program just announced a new series, Website Optimiser Seminars for Success. So, if you're interested in full day, in-person seminars providing hands-on training on Website Optimiser, this may be useful for you. More information can be found on the Seminars for Success site, www.google.com/awseminars.

Posted by Gavin, Dublin AdWords Team