Google Launches Website Optimizer

Rockgod writes "Google Analytics Senior Manager Brett Crosby unveiled the tool, called Google Website Optimizer, this morning at the eMetrics summit in Washington D.C. If you find web site traffic heat maps like CrazyEgg, ClickDensity or Google Analytics' own heat map interesting, this looks like the next generation of that kind of tool. If Google's Website Optimizer can score high on usability, I expect it to be a big hit with small and medium size website publishers."

Re:That's great and all...

[setirw]

It supposedly can determine which home pages make the greatest impression on users. I agree with you, though, that this should have been included in the summary, which is meaningless.

Re:Optimising Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious!

Now... did you actually look at the site? It's nothing to do with HTML validation, and therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with the W3C's HTML Validation Service. :-P

Re:Mixed Feelings

[hanwen]

you're completely off the mark here. This product aims to increase effectiveness of an adwords campaign, ie. getting people to buy your stuff after they've gone to your website.
   

This is not tool to help increase a sites ranking

[@madeus]

This is not a tool to help people increase their sites ranking in Google. It's a tool for customers who pay Google for advertising to help those advertisers drive up revenue by converting more visitors (those who notice the advert and click through) into paying customers by making their sited better at driving customers into making a purchase.

Re:"algorithm" ..or google users?

[tolan-b]

No the way it works is that you identify parts of a page that you want to experiment with with tags, include a javascript library on it and a conversion page, and then tell google what variations on the tagged item (alternate headlines for example) you want to test.

When someone goes to that page, google will randomly select one of your alternate headlines and replace the original one with it. It'll then check if that person buys something (or subscribes or whatever).

It then gives you a report of which variations lead to the most conversions.

Re:That's great and all...

[Jellybob]

It's a tool for Adwords optimization - you give the application some blocks of your page, and several variations of the content for them, and then a percentage of your visitors get each version.

This allows you to try out different sets of content, and see which one leads to the most conversions (software downloads, sales, enquiries etc.), and hopefully save some money at the same time. We have several clients you are spending over £1000/month on Adwords, and it really pays to be able to see what works.

It's for marketer's landing pages

[1sockchuck]

This tool is most helpful for companies who buy a lot of AdWords and route the the clicks to optimized "landing pages" that present a focused marketing pitch. From what I've seen, the Optimizer's real value is to help these AdWords buyers figure out which of their landing pages is producing the best performance in routing readers to their product pages. Getting that kind of data in a quick, user-friendly fashion will have value to these folks.

Re:Enhancing your ability to get ads

[Spliffster]

"I currently don't like NoScript because of the bar that's constantly at the bottom of every site with scripts by ... "

Mozilla products are very nice because of their customisation possibilities. You can do the following:

1. open Dom inspector
2. File > Instepct a window > [select any window just not a document]
3. Search > Select Element By Click
4. click on the annoying element
5. Profit!!! ... just kidding

then see how you can identify it, if it has a n ID attribute this would be the easiest way, otherwise search for the first id in a parent node.

then open your profile folder, create the file "chrome/userChrome.css" if it does not exist. Then you can simply add some CSS (2, partially 3 ... just everything that is supported by mozilla) like:
--
#elementid {display: none;}
or
#parentelement elementname {display: none;}
--

done. You can modify any aspect of firefox (and derivates) this way, this doesn't work for SeaMonkey/Mozilla Suite however, since the UI is only in FF implemented in XUL.

Have fun!
-S