When you run a landing page test in Google’s Website Optimizer, one thing to consider is how long it’s going to take to get meaningful (“statistically significant”) results.

If you have too many variables, or if a small percentage of your visitors actually make it from the test page to the goal page, it’s going to take a long time to get results.

After you set up your experiment it’s somewhat frustrating to wait for a statistically significant result when it’s obvious that one of your options is a dog. For example, consider this.

The third option in the first section is a loser. Why allow it to continue to drag down response while waiting for a final answer?

You don’t have to.

If you go into the “combinations” tab for your experiment you can disable the versions that include the losing option. That directs more of the traffic to the options that are still viable and makes the experiment go a lot quicker.