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."
I agree that Slashdot has serious "when somebody farts at Google it's news" syndrome, but I don't think that "online marketing" is necessarily disjoint with Slashdot readers.
Especially Google's form of it. Slashdotters are coders and often want to put up interesting web sites to highlight their ideas, but that costs money, especially if significant bandwidth is involved. You can collect it from donations or support it with ads, and there aren't a whole lot of other options for sites which are interesting but don't have an obvious revenue model. Especially at the small scale, where the work of handling the revenue stream can distract you from doing the actual content of your site.
At least the AdWords are relatively unobtrusive, and targeted, which means that they may actually be of some interest to the people reading your web site.
Advertising is not evil. Flashing/spinning/dancing/up-popping/distracting advertising is evil. Polite, relevant advertising can be a way to support something without an immense amount of additional work.
Slashdotters are coders and often want to put up interesting web sites to highlight their ideas, but that costs money,
Actually developers (at least those who do free software) have it very easy to advertise their work on Google: it's very simple and quite work-free to get a dingy little project page ranked very well on Google. All you have to do is list it on Freshmeat with the proper words in the project description and wait a couple of days. The huge number of sites that link to Freshmeat and archive the FM frontpage will automatically make a kajillion link to the project's page. I myself maintain a dozen small OSS projects that are almost invariably ranked very well in the Google first page when searching with fairly generic terms relevant to my applications.
So no, coders and nerds in general (the admitted target audience of Slashdot) don't need Google's marketing tools and don't need to pay a cent for them, because they benefit from the huge F/OSS social network on the net. Those who do need Google's marketing tools are those who try to *sell* you something that, unless the product is exceptionally good, isn't going to be listed at the top of the Google search unless the pusher pays Google.
That's why I say again that I (and I think most Slashdot readers) don't need/want to read about marketing tools.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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."
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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