Brainy Days: Lateralization & Website Optimization

Objective

Westwood College is no stranger to search engine marketing (SEM). The school has been utilizing SEM for several years, leaving no stones unturned when it comes to campaign enhancements and optimization opportunities. Westwood College’s SEM campaigns undergo nearly continuous revisions in an effort to remain successful in the competitive education and online education verticals.

Westwood College, along with Redstone College and Westwood College Online, are a system of higher education institutions powered by Denver-based Alta College, Inc. The colleges educate some 12,000 students in numerous programs. Currently, Alta College operates 19 campuses in six states, as well as offers several online courses and degree programs.

Westwood has relied on the same SEM agency for five years running. In that time period, the agency has taken advantage of every new feature and program available for managing and improving pay per click (PPC) campaigns. Therefore, when Google released the beta version of their landing page optimization tool, Google Website Optimizer (GWO), Westwood’s SEM agency jumped at the chance.

Google Website Optimizer allows advertisers to determine which layout and content generate the most conversions on their website. The GWO system allows advertisers to change multiple sections of a page (e.g., headline, length of copy, images); these sections are equally and randomly rotated while conversions are tracked for each combination. GWO eliminates guesswork by revealing actual performance data on two or more versions of a webpage.

The SEM agency had designed unique landing pages for each degree, school and campus for all three colleges, pages which had served as PPC destinations for some time. Due to the many landing pages associated with the Westwood campaign, implementing a multivariate test for each was an extremely daunting task. The agency decided there had to be a simpler, yet equally significant test that could potentially increase conversion rates.

Instead of conducting an intricate multivariate test for each page, the agency opted to take a creative, psychological approach. For each program offered by Westwood, Redstone and Westwood Online, they conducted A/B split tests, using a right form versus left form. The agency hoped to create a correlation between the type of program and side of the page on which the form performed better, ultimately drawing some conclusions for lateralization of brain function as applied to online conversion activities.