Slashdot Mirror
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."
... but what is it?
Or enhancing advertisers' ability to get your eyeballs.
Either way, it's not for us.
This'll be great, I can analyse Slashdot and post the results in the comments section along with some helpful suggestions, +5 Funny here I come!
*Clicks link*
*Clicks Sign up*
*Starts filling in form*
*Notices that signing up to Ad Words is required*
*Notices that adding a phone number is required*
*Gives up and decides to just post the results of W3C's HTML Validation Service instead*
Summation 2
..but is it beta?
I think this is cool. Google Adwords is somewhat of a statistical pain in the butt. I've spent hours upon hours of my life analyzing keywords, click rates, etc. for pushing more traffic to various sites on the web. If this tool eases that pain, even just a little, I say it is a good thing. Google needs us to succeed with AdWords as much as we want to succeed.
One day the toilets of the world will rise up... And I'm going to nuke them.
Google giving advice is always going to help two sets of people - those who already have websites and want to optimise them, and those who are attempting to create websites to rank highly. If we look at why people creating websites usually want to get them to rank highly google the reasons are primarily monetary, which means that this tool is mainly giving advice to those who are trying to displace older (and possibly better sites). Say I have site A. which is dedicated to mountain biking news and has been running since 1997 with messageboards, news etc and hasn't been optimised for the best google rankings and we have Site B. which was created 3 months ago and uses RSS syndication to just serve up content from other sites and monetising it with something like adsense is the main point, then which should really rank higher in Google? I'm thinking A because it is more of a legitimate site.
I think there is a point where trying to rank highly in Google is OK for wanting to growth in your site, but if Google continue to give out such tools then surely people will start producing sites that match exactly what it wants to see in order to get traffic. I'm starting to think that it shouldn't be sites that have to be optimised for Google to rank them highly, but Google to be optimised to pick up the best sites for each search term instead of landing pages or shells that are just there for advertising revenue.
Business Voyeur
Google's new website optimizer suddenly quits after being run against MySpace. It's been reported the optimizer was later heard weeping, as well as muttering "the horror."
.. how about they send some kind of robot around their search listings, to delist any page that is little more links to another page. I've been looking for something and found links to a site that's basically links, which links to another site made up of links etc..
Step 1: Create a myspace page for the mother of someone you wish to disparage.
Step 2: Get it to rank highly for "fat", "skank", or another appropriate pejorative
Step 3: Enjoy their sweet sweet tears. If possible lick them right off their face.
I'm somewhat unclear on this, and I watched 80% of the flash demo linked above before getting insanely bored (mostly due to the pace) and letting my ADHD take over. From what I can tell, they are implying that this is not an algorithm doing the "checking" of your web site, but rather human editors/users. The flash demo mentions testing optimization of images as well, which I believe wouldn't be something easily automated through an algorithm (at least not easily automated to derive USEFUL results). However, i'm a bit confused because they aren't very specific as to who or what will be testing your site for clickthru/etc. At some point I started to think "oh, okay, google editors/volunteers will be testing it" (much like the google image labeler beta linked from /. a few weeks ago).. and then i started to suspect they are actually just using the code to run multiple "live" versions of your site and let NORMAL google users view them in a random distribution and then see which ones stay (and buy) and for how long etc. But maybe I just misunderstood and got distracted 5 seconds before they explained this haha. Anyone with the answer?
If it really is the latter method, I am sure it would work for some web sites, but I know for our company's site, we can only ever display one version of our content, as any minor changes at all tend to draw a lot of industry attention (i.e. "hey what are these guys up to.. their site updated.. OMG is the next big product about to drop, blah blah").. so I hope that out of the three methods, it's either an algorithm, or a small subset of google trustees/volunteers. But then again, our industry (digital cinema) is a typical and I'm sure no matter which method, this will work great for mom & pop selling Pokemon trading cards or whatever.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
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.
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.
And the winner is: w3.org. The CSS section is probably the most useful part of it, but the whole thing is heartily recommended. To test you level of optimization there is an automated tool for HTML markup as well as one for CSS.
But I spat out my coffee when it said "Make this bike yours" with a picture of a woman...