Is your web content actually helping to achieve the goals of your community project? If you're not sure, you might want to experiment with different types of online content. A new feature of Google Analytics can help you experiment with content in a precise, measurable way aligned with specific engagement goals.

Often engagement can be measured through concrete actions such as signups for a newsletter or text alerts, event registrations, or information or appointment requests. Google's new content experiments, just launched this summer, lets you test which version of a landing page leads to the greatest improvement in goal completion or metric value. You can test up to five variations of a page.

This expands upon a popular strategy known as "A/B testing," in which web visitors are randomly supplied with different versions of a page. You can then track resulting actions according to which page version yielded which results.

According to Google, "Content Experiments is a somewhat different approach from either standard A/B or multivariate testing. Content Experiments is more A/B/N. You're not testing just two versions of a page as in A/B testing, and you're not testing various combinations of components on a single page as in multivariate testing. Instead, you are testing up to five full versions of a single page, each delivered to visitors from a separate URL."

Google Content Experiments will allow you to:

• Compare how different web pages perform using a random sample of your visitors.
• Define what percentage of your visitors are included in the experiment.
• Choose which objective you'd like to test.
• Get e-mail updates about how your experiment is doing.

To start using Content Experiments, you'll need to run Google Analytics for your website (including your mobile website, or any microsites you manage for specific programs or campaigns). Try your first Content Experiment now.