Slashdot Mirror
Google Website Optimizer
compuglot writes "Google has released the third leg of the stool in its quest to dominate online marketing. Google Website Optimizer is a multivariate testing application that allows users to test elements and combinations of elements in a website or landing page. The goal is increased conversions, and of course AdWords market share."
Eh. It's a way for them to sell more ads. No big deal. Even local newspapers have design departments that do nothing but help people make better advertisements in their own newspaper.
I don't respond to AC's.
This is pathetic: this "article" is nothing more than a PR release. I don't want to read that sort of thing, and especially not about something that makes online marketers' lives easier!
Since I have the weakness to believe Slashdot isn't paid to plug Google, I can only deduce that they tend to post about anything that has "Google" written in it somewhere, which is lame...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The goal is increased conversions, and of course AdWords market share.
And, of course, they have the benefit of people optimizing their sites to work the best with Google, but not necessarily everyone else.
Call me paranoid, but this is starting to smell a lot like the 'embrace and extend' strategy we've all come to know and love.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
(I know I'm feeding the troll, but whatever...)
And the problem with that is...? Just because it's written for a scholarship essay contest doesn't mean that it's not worth reading.
of revenue does Google keep from adwords clicks, and what percentage gets passed along to the people making and sharing the valued content? The line between good, evil, and where google stands continues to blur.
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
That's an awful web site. Take a look at this page. The Google logo appears with the wrong background color. Another company logo appears with the wrong background color and bad clipping. Stupid slogan: "It's all about results". There's terrible copy, like: "Dale and Thomas plans to use Google Website Optimizer for multivariate testing from now on, from logo results, to which headlines prompt higher conversion rates, to whether a Peanut Butter and White Chocolate DrizzleCorn(TM) picture sells more popcorn than a Toffee Crunch DrizzleCorn(TM) image." That's not even a sentence.
This looks like an amateur eBay "seller"'s first web site. It's embarassing for Google. They're losing their touch.
Worse, Google used to disfavor "landing pages" and "doorway pages" in search ranking. Now, this part of Google is telling people to use them. This raises some questions.
The problem is the entire article is just more "teh-Google-is-for-awesome" tripe. Google's great and all, but praise-for-pay (or in this case, praise-for-A's)journalism should never be considered news; just marketing. I will give the article props however; they at least identified the author as a student.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I'm so, so glad to see that there's proper attention being drawn to multivariate testing (finally), as it's something that few--very few--companies and individuals alike have ever really understood.
Understanding that Option A may work better than Option B isn't *nearly* as powerful as understanding that if you'd just taken certain components from them both, you'd have something even better still. Instead most marketers end up doing this endless Option A vs Option B stuff and never end up with what's really the "right" answer.
Then, there's the whole patience factor... most marketers don't have the simple willpower to put a test out there and let it run its course--especially when you've got so many options to test to do it right. Often, shortcuts get pulled because one particular version didn't work well, so it's assumed that derivative pages will also perform sub-par. (The reality is often surprising.)
Lastly, while we're on the topic of multivariate testing to my knowledge the only firm that has done proper, fully automated multivariate testing is Memetrics. Having worked with the so-called MVT solutions of other companies (which were mostly a joke) and Memetrics, too, Memetrics is the hands-down winner.
Google may have broader reach and even better marketing, but Memetrics is really a cut above IMHO.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
Tell me about it. I'm currently running a little experiment which headline performs better and for shits and giggles threw in a "placebo"-headline (it is just a non-sense statement that has nothing to do with the product). The placebo outperformed the other headlines ...
I wonder where the submitter pulled this stupid idea of "increased AdWords market share", because after RTFA'ing and watching the demos, it becomes quite clear that it is not the point of Google Website Optimizer.
/. where even the submitters don't RTFA?!
Are we entering a new era of
Try Atlas Solutions Site Optimization for a more service-oriented product. Posted anonymously for obvious reasons.
The goal of this optimizer is increased sales/conversion/et cetera. I'm going to hijack this topic a bit and ask: Does anyone know of any other good website optimization tests? I know, of course, of the W3C Validator and I'm familiar with a cacheability tester or two, but... I'd like to know if there are any other good ones out there. Are there any which will check for fun things like metadata and navigation tags (remember and such?) and present you with a big list of all the things you can do to go the extra mile for your site?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
they should apply the optimizer on their own pages.
anything google is relative to all media outlets. consumers, searchers and enterprises employ their technology and networks to save and earn money. there are a number of users who derive value from flash notices that reveal new services otherwise unsurfaced months after posting.
google's toll free directory aided my location of parsons school of design offices today. something that otherwise would have required interacting with numerous sheltered, zombie, disaffected New Yorkers.
finally slashdot surely realizes that several thousand hits may be gained from a teaser notice proclaiming the 32nd google service launch this year (a completely random number but perhaps within reach of their rabid engineers creativity).
to google and search and newspaper ads and radio and mobile and toll free and video game ads and open api and productivity monetizations.
the third leg of the stool
Isn't there some sort of limit to the amount of unintentional innuendo a single Slashdot article is allowed to have?
My company has a large adwords account with Google so they let us beta test the product.
I have to say, while it may not be as extensive as Memetrics, it's *very* easy to setup in comparison. Working with a graphics designer for the alternative graphics, I was able to code up a test in one day and deploy without any problems.
We let the experiment run for a couple weeks, got about 100,000 results, and used the reports to generate a new landing page based on the most successful experiment. The only catch for us was we couldn't use CSS to layout the images. The tool was having problems allocating a layer, so we had to layout out page using table tags which will annoy some designers.
For a cost of $0 and a quick implementation time, it was well worth it.
if it were free.
Oh wait...
Perhaps this thing will convince people to point their ads at pages that match instead of generic home pages. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on a very specific Google ad, only to be dumped onto a generic home page from which it would require at least three clicks to get to the specific thing I wanted in the first place, if it even exists at the site. (And that's not even counting the asinine "Find cheap your search terms on EBay!" affiliate ads, since I know better than to click on those...)
When that happens, not only do I leave the site immediately, resulting in wasted advertising money, I also lose faith in the overall relevancy of Google ads, making me less likely to click on any ads in the future. Generic landing pages aren't just a problem for individual advertisers; they hurt Google too.
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Google has released the third leg of the stool
Sounds like that's one long, painful stool
Subtle difference:
October's release was polydimensional, but this one is multivariate.
The forthcoming release, tentatively entitled "Google Website Optimizer", is expected to be panfactorial.
We have no choice but to tag this "stool", as that's certainly what it seems to be!
I left my wallet in El Sigundo!
Invariably when anything is posted about Google there are countless people whining that it's irrelevant and non-newsworthy. I entirely disagree. As others pointed out, Google's text ads / AdWords are pretty unobstrive. Many people here are in the Webapp / website business. Search engine optimization, both for commercial and non-commercial sites, is an important topic. If you can't accept that, find another job.
At this point I have to point out that there are people that sometimes are only interested in commercial links. These people know they want to buy something and they know that the "Sponsored Links" are ads. These people do want to arrive at a place where there's a good or a service to sell, not on a website whose forums are full of people spitting out conspiracy theories about product X or Y.
50 % of people searching online are using Google and are hence concerned by AdWords.
I'm not using AdWords and, heck, I don't even have a website... But I find the underlying technology simply amazing. I use Google as a search engine and I like to know "how things work under the hood". This is "news for nerds", get over it.
Surely if you release the third leg of a stool, it will collapse?
I've been using GWO for a while now. It is ok. But for many, the variations are normally more than a page change (like under-the-hood shared objects), so it basically throws out many uses for this. If you do like GWO, I suggest you check out CrazyEgg: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crazyegg_meas uring_website_usability.php
The goal is increased conversions, and of course AdWords market share."
Say what's a who now?
Sometimes I miss the wild and wooly days of HTML 1.0 when marketers and advertisers thought a web was where a spider lived.
If microsoft did this, not only would it be 180meg to download, and require WGA, but also require Vista.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Did their marketing demo page just get slashdotted, or is the problem unrelated? It's down for me: https://trainingcenter.google.com/websiteoptimizer overview
Also, I think it's funny that this story is tagged with 'stool', the only one tagged as such.
I guess I'll have to remodulate the shields.