Google Website Optimizer (GWO) Tutorial - Advanced Usage My Way

I’ve created a series of tutorials about Google Website Optimizer that will hopefully help others. These screencasts are not perfect by any means, but hopefully they will get the point across.

Google Website Optimizer is a tool you can use to serve out various versions of website pages and measure how those variations affect the rate for visitors reaching a goal on your website. One obvious case is for ecommerce sites to measure changes to pages and how it affects order placement conversion rate. I’ve seen on the job various changes to a website that can have a significant affect on conversion rate.

I do not follow the method that Google prescribes to create Website Optimizer experiments. Google attempted to make the GWO experiment creation process as easy as possible, but I find it a bit constricting. I’ve implemented GWO experiments on the job and have found ways to work with GWO that I find more to my liking.

Please note that I only go over creating multivariate experiments. I do not cover A/B experiments.

In the following tutorial I discuss how I go about creating Google Website Optimizer experiments.

Here I go over Google Website Optimizer experiment creation once again, but in a much more abbreviated manner.

In the next tutorial I go over how I approach implementing GWO experiments in website code. For this example I’m using an ASP.NET MVC website. I go over how to vary page content based on a page section variation using jQuery.

In the next tutorial I discuss implementing GWO experiments and XHTML compliance. The default mechanism provided by Google is not XHTML compliant, so I go over how to use GWO and maintain XHTML compliance. The JavaScript script provided by Google is not XHTML and Google also recommends using a </noscript>HTML element which is way off from being well formatted!

In my final GWO tutorial, I go over how to interpret GWO results. You have to be careful about how to interpret if a certain page variation is better than other variations.

I hope these tutorials are useful to someone :-)

I also highly recommend you check out www.gwotricks.com which is a great GWO resource.