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 ...
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.
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.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Google has released the third leg of the stool
Sounds like that's one long, painful stool
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!
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.
I guess I'll have to remodulate the shields.