Thursday, January 20, 2011

Pros & Cons of Google Website Optimizer

Pros & Cons of Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer allows you to test different versions of a landing page so you can gather user performance data and select the page (or different elements of a page) that generates the most conversions.

Google Website Optimizer Pros
  • Google Website Optimizer is a free tool. So if one of your concerns is budgetary, know that you don’t need to spend a penny to start testing
  • ou don’t have to be a Web developer or a highly-skilled CRO expert to launch an A/B test. Setting up an experiment in GWO is relatively quick and easy
  • Leveraging a free tool that’s able to help you increase sales is about as good as it gets when it comes to ROI.
Google Website Optimizer Cons
  • Google Website Optimizer is pretty one-dimensional. There are a lot of things you can’t do that you are able to do with some of the really advanced paid CRO platforms like Test and Target and Liveball, such as….
  • Tracking Multiple Conversion Paths: Unless you have access to engineers who can hack the tracking script, you can only test one conversion path in each experiment.
  • This is a drawback because if you wanted to test a few different offers on a page, you’re restricted to testing only one at a time, and to test multiple offers on a page (say a home page for instance),  you’ll need to run subsequent tests on each offer. NOTE: if anyone knows of a script hack to test multiple conversion paths simultaneously in GWO, feel free to drop a link in the comments.
  • Can’t Control Traffic Split: GWO controls traffic distribution on experiments and attempts to split traffic equally between test pages, meaning there’s no ability to run a custom traffic split, like 60/40, 70/30, etc.
  • Can’t Segment Visitors: With GWO, you’re unable to implement advanced visitor segmentation or to show different pages to new users vs returning visitors or based on search term or location, etc.
Google Website Optimizer is still a fantastic tool that allows the average business owner, webmaster or PPC marketer to get busy improving conversion rates immediately…and for free.

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