Google Official Policy – Landing Page Testing Is Not Cloaking

Over the years I have had many people indicate to me that one of the reasons that they have not done conversion tuning on their site is that they are afraid that they will be accused of cloaking by Google and lose their high position in the search results.

Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to the search engine spiders than to actual visitors to your site. In extreme cases this can be used as a bait-and-switch tactic to draw an audience to your page and then show them completely unrelated content. Obviously if a lot of websites did this, the trust level in search results would go down, and search engines would have a lot of heat directed at them.

Danny Sullivan blogged his concerns about this in his post on April 4, 2007 Google Website Optimizer Now Available, But Is It Cloaking?

On the other hand, search engines also want people to find relevant information, and the whole point of landing page optimization is to find out what appeals to your visitors.

We have been doing landing page optimization for many years and have never heard of anyone getting busted for cloaking during a test. As part of Google’s Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant program we have been asking for a long time for an official clarification of this position. It is finally here!

Official Google Policy FAQ Answer: How does Website Optimizer fit in with Google’s view of cloaking?

The conclusion is pretty definitive: landing page testing is not cloaking.

As long as you are running a legitimate test and do not completely change the theme of you page you are in the clear.

Google also suggests putting up your winning page after the test and removing your testing code.

So now that we have that out of the way – go start testing!

Delayed Conversions

A recent paper from Scan Alert highlights a growing trend in e-tailing. The average time that it takes a browser to convert into a buyer is growing. As consumers become more savvy, they are more likely to take their time to research the best solution and comparison shop.

ScanAlert’s Digital Window Shopping Report 2007.

We keep track of conversion latencies as a matter of course during our tests.

Here is an example of conversion rate (CR) as a function of time for one of our head too head tests (the timescale is a logarithmic one to show more information).

Usually we see a clear “elbow” and then delayed conversions trickling in. Sometimes the slope of the delayed conversion “tail” is proportional to the height of the elbow (when displayed on a logarithmic scale like the image below). In other words, the percentage of delayed conversions is the same for all tested versions of the landing page. But this is not always the case.

In the graph above, our challenger version had an elbow at 9.5% and an 11% final CR (an increase of 16%). The original baseline version of the site had an elbow at 5% and eventually peaked at 6.5% (an increase of 30%). So the original baseline had a higher percentage of delayed conversions, but a lower overall conversion rate at the end of the day.

An important implication for online testing is that you have to “age” your data from the most recent data collection periods to make sure that you are comparing apples-to-apples versus past periods (or else consider only the “unaged” conversions from the same span of time in the earlier data collection period).

Truth In Advertising? …

Our marketing team was recently conducting some research about companies in our industry. We were using the free Spider Viewer SEO tool from WeBuildPages.com. It shows you how the search engine spiders view your page.

When we ran the tool on Offermatica’s homepage on 7/5/2007, this is the result we got (highlighting added):

• Poor HTML coding?
• Fair and balanced truth in advertising?
• Do search engine spiders have x-ray vision?

You be the judge