Google Website Optimizer
Part 1: “What’s so good or different about Google Website Optimizer?”—written by Sandra Cheng of Google
Even though it’s free, Google Website Optimizer is built on robust, enterprise-grade technology. It uses a patented doc.write tagging methodology that eliminates any flickering when changing content, minimizes latency, increases ease of tagging, and enables failsafe impact on critical content.
Website Optimizer’s reports use easy-to-read visualizations with simple color-coding to show the performance of the different page versions.
To learn more…
…visit the Google Website Optimizer page. If you still have unanswered questions, contact this list: gwo-contact@google.com; Website Optimizer’s core team members are all subscribed to it. Google’s help forum is also a great resource. Don’t forget to check out the customer reviews first—see below.
Part 2: User ratings at a glance
To read reviews of Google Website Optimizer, see below. This section contains the average ratings from all the reviews.
| Ease of use |   |
| Customer support | |
| User guides, documentation, etc. | |
| Value for money | |
| How likely would you be to recommend this service? |  |
[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: More than $10 million per year. Visitors per month: More than 1 million. Started using it: 01/02/2008. Chose it because: It was free. Date stopped using it: 1st April 2008. for the following reason: Inconclusive results, and due to dynamic site content, it was performing tests on other pages, in addition to the page we were meaning to test.
What results did you get from it?: None. But at some stages it looked like we were getting a definite winner, then the results would change totally. Note that our test was performed for extremely high traffic (cheap holidays, Adwords position 1-3).
Full review: I think there needs to be a government warning on how you should use the data. If you use Google’s metrics, you could easily jump to the wrong conclusions, and could end up changing your site to make it worse. There were stages in our test, when one page combination was performing hugely better than all other combinations (98% confidence it was the winner by a large conversion rate difference, and this was for 1000s visits per combination). However, after more time, the results totally changed, and the original hot favourite, turned into a rank outsider.
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[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: Two websites: Less than $10,000 per year, and $10,000–$100,000 per year. Visitors per month: 10,000–100,000. Started using it: 2008. Chose it because: GWO is free, so a good way to start testing conversion rate optimization. Reason stopped using it: GWO is a real pain to setup; the tagging of sections and pages is fiddly and time consuming, and certain server side setups (eg, PHP/SMARTY templating) will mess up the code. Still using it sometimes.
What results did you get from it?: I’ve had some great results with GWO; early tests had the most significant improvements, but for a free tool you can have some quite spectacular successes.
Full review: GWO is a fantastic tool, especially given the fact it’s free. But it’s also is a real pain to install and setup. It’s easy to make mistakes, and hard to work out what’s wrong if there are problems. The process is enough to put off many friends I’ve recommended GWO to. As such, I think it’s only suited to webmasters who are comfortable getting their hands dirty with code. However, given the price, there’s really no better way to get started in split testing.
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[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: $10,000–$100,000 per year. Visitors per month: 10,000–100,000. Started using it: october 2008. Chose it because: free and it is Google. Date stopped using it: still going.
What results did you get from it?: takes a long time to decide most test run for months.
Full review: Google Website Optimiser is a free tool that allows you to test elements of a web page to improve conversions. I quite like it as its easy to use, allows me to test different ideas on a single page, its flexible enough to run on template driven sites plus it waits until it has enough statistical confidence to make a conclusion on an experiment (which can take a while). I’d like to use more of it in the future to test new marketing ideas.
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[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: Two websites: $10,000–$100,000 per year and $100,000–$1 million per year. Visitors per month: 1,000–10,000 per month. Started using it: Dec 08. Chose it because: Articles read on Conversion Rate Experts website, and it’s a natural progression from our work with Google Analytics.
What results did you get from it?: We experimented with several landing pages for PPC campaigns and found that one variant converted much more than the others. As a result we were able to convince the client to use this landing page full time, which has so far resulted in a dramatic sales increase for them.
Full review: The best thing about Google Website Optimizer is that you know what you’re going to get even before you start to use it. It’s a google product and as you’d expect, it is usable, flexible, and easy to explore. The help videos and text are well written and the reporting is excellent. We’re extremely happy to recommend the product; although for those not used to fiddling around with website design and coding it would perhaps be better to get an agency such as the one I work at to help you with implementation and strategy. A lay user could teach themselves to use Google website optimizer but this would probably require quite a hefty time investment building up the required knowledge and skills on website design. An agency is also more likely to have a direct line to Google’s support staff – they have been very helpful to us suggesting ways in which we can advance our use of the tool.
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[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: $100,000–$1 million per year. Visitors per month: 10,000–100,000. Started using it: May 2008. Chose it because: It’s a Google tool. We had good success with Adwords and Analytics, but had not yet tried Website Analyzer. Also, we wanted a tool where we didn’t have to install, update, and be sys admins. Date stopped using it: Still using it.
What results did you get from it?: We were able to determine which pages converted traffic to opt-ins for a number of landing pages (we have themed landing pages to match search queries).
Full review: As with most Google Tools it’s pretty damn good. It’s fairly easy to set up, and it prompts you to test the configuration before going live so you don’t have any bad surprises. I like that it is integrated inside the adwords/analytics system so you have all the tools in one place.
The thing I like the least is this tool requires a lot more traffic (time) to get results than a full Taguchi multivariate testing tool. We have run a couple dozen experiments and still have some running. But almost all of them are simple A/B split tests in order to get results faster.
As for level of technical expertise… if you can setup adwords, you can setup this testing tool. This tool would be fine for a small business as long as they realize results will take a while based on how much traffic they get. It’s definitely easy to use. And it’s fine for larger businesses who don’t want to install and maintain their own in house systems. Google scales well and can handle a lot of traffic.
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[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: $1 million to $10 million. Visitors per month: 100,000–1 million. Started using it: Sept 08. Chose it because: Ease of use and I am already an Adwords user. It was very easy to setup and results are clear. Date stopped using it: Ongoing.
What results did you get from it?: Very clear results from a number of A/B split tests. Allowed us to greatly improve conversions.
Full review: I like the fact that all you need is to add some code and enter url details in admin. It takes 10 minutes to setup a new split test. We have run 3 or 4 different tests with many other planned. I would say it is only suitable if you are getting decent traffic and conversions as otherwise the results may take too long to be conclusive. I have not really needed support as the online guides make it very clear how to us the program. Provided you can add some code to your webpages then you will find it very easy to use.
Since it is free it is very hard to criticise. There may be lots of things it cannot do but I have not needed any more that what is offered.
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[The following review was submitted via a survey, hence the formatting.]
Website revenue: Two sites: $10,000–$100,000 per year, and $100,000–$1 million per year. Visitors per month: 10,000–100,000 for each website. Started using it: February 2009 Chose it because: It is easy to implement and my clients wanted an easy way to view the results of the tests. Dealing with a non-technical client, Google’s interface makes it easy to explain split testing. In conjunction with Analytics, WSO can provide valuable data for all stakeholders.
What results did you get from it?: Split testing showed that our live help button was immensely valuable. Our site visitors interacted with our live chat feature even when our live chat operators were not online. Every week we get at least 5 inquiries through our live chat button during non-business hours. In our business, if we convert 1 out of 5 of these people, we can nearly double our business in one year!
Full review: Google Website Optimizer is suitable for testing any type of website. Its easy to use interface and straightforward approach to A/B testing makes it an invaluable tool. I love the interface. It sometimes has trouble with multiple conversion tracking. We run 1 test every 2 weeks, so 5 tests thus far. I haven’t had any trouble with WSO. A step by step wizard to handle multiple conversion tracking would be beneficial. This would require a deeper integration with Analytics though.
I find Google once again has provided the best tool for free. They will need to improve the multiple conversion tracking however. Once they do that, it will be the ultimate testing tool. It is a must for any website that wants to convert visitors into avid fans.
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A very additive software. Every time I make a change on my website, I use google’s website optimization tool. Found the multivariate option is a bit awkward but the A/B experiment is brilliant. We are always testing a couple of different homepages – Whether it’s the headline, a new graphic or photo – we test everything. Every little percent over time makes a big difference. You need patience with these tools but it’s worth it.
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We are using the Website Optimizer for some of our customers and we really like it. It ist easy to set-up and the integration with Magento Commerce ist quickly done. Even if the Website Optimizer is not the most advanced suite for testing it has got some pretty nice features. Especially the A/B-Testing ist nice even if got some minor problems e.g. with iframes.
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We use Google Website Optimizer’s Mulitvariate Tests to optimize our Magento shop. It is very easy to set-up Testings because of Magento’s built in functionality. For everyone who’s interested in optimizing Magento shops – Website Optimizer should be the first choice.
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Easily one of the best rounded testing platforms we’ve used to date.
The availability of Google’s datacentres means that (even in Australia and New Zealand), our clients tests run without any impact on page load times.
The sheer amount of support and documentation across the web and in Google’s forums makes this a really easy tool to pickup and run complex tests. We’ve managed to run tests that:
-Integrate with Google Analytics (To measure avaerage order value increases & more)
-Identify segments that we can target with behavioural targeting & segmentation (through BTBuckets)
-Use alternative methods for displaying content (rather than through the standard AB or MVT methods)
-Setup click-tracking and goals on other actions
Given we’re from a technical background, we understand how to implement these more advanced techniques, but I can see why other people choose other platforms over this. While the others are easier to implement the advanced techniques for a higher cost per month, GWO is simple enough that techies can implement these for free.
Another thing that people misunderstand is that the features of segmentation and targeting requires ludicrous amounts of traffic to work properly. Most businesses are better off ignoring these features anyway.
For 90% of cases I come across, GWO is all you need.
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