Google's Website Optimizer

Talk about a potentially disruptive technology! Google has released a new product that integrates with AdWords: a landing page testing tool called info from Google here. It seems only select advertisers will be invited to participate in the beta.

"does not require consulting or professional services to implement. By allowing site visitors to determine what content is most useful, as indicated by the highest conversion rate, we are removing the guesswork and trial-and-error experiments that used to be the norm for determining landing page optimization." So, go ahead and do it yourself. Your customers and computers will give you the right answers! Multivariate testing in a box! Agreed, that's the rough idea, but there is a bit that goes on behind the scenes to get you to the point of testing, let alone to conduct the test, no? Perhaps all Google means is that the tool works very well, and that testing and not preconceived notions should be the foundation of landing page design. Perhaps this is just a matter of semantics or usability/marketing philosophies, but the wording does sort of sound like a swipe at third parties. "We've released a new technology, and only a helpless idiot would need to hire someone to implement it," is what is sounds like to me. Our clients aren't helpless, they just don't run web design and marketing copywriting (and multivariate testing, and media planning, etc.) shops for a living. There is a cost for running sophisticated marketing tests. Google wants to imply - to what end I have no idea - that there is no cost to this (maybe they want props as the "price slashers" for professional services... "we will be welcomed as liberators!"). Forgetting for a moment the main cost - loss of privacy of sales data and consumer behavior to the benefit of the world's largest online advertising broker - there is also a cost beyond that, the normal costs of running a business and achieving objectives using someone's expertise. Although a multivariate testing tool is very good at testing, say, five button designs with five different messages on them, who came up with today's leading button designs? Who came up with the wording? Who knows that button design is or is not one of the top ten priorities on the page? Top three? Who cares? Who is expert in trends in that area and who would screw it up, even if they had a great tool? Actually, unless you have extreme click volumes, some of those creative decisions are very important, because you would need 100,000 clicks to test *everything* using brute force. You have to start in a "headstart" position if you're trying to get answers out of 1,000-10,000 clicks, which would be more the norm. And if those clicks cost $1 each... well, you get the point. You can't always test all permutations of conversion rates on five button sizes, five button colors, five button designs, and five button wordings on a reasonable number of clicks. There is a real-world environment to consider here and other factors like seasonality and many others can begin to intervene. And in the above example, you'd only have figured out the best button for one particular vertical on one landing page, and nothing else. You could weakly extrapolate the results to other situations. So clearly there's a need for professionals who can begin with reasonably persuasive, creative, page elements in the first place. And to have them come up with multiple options and to run the tests... will require something akin to professional services. As Google's pre-test checklist basically asks: "you've already got plenty of creative content to plug into this don't you?" Well hello. Many companies do not, and expect it to be created out of thin air. Google's implying that this is trivial and costless is not helping. Now there's another factor to consider. Google says that while you're using Website Optimizer, your AdWords quality scores won't be affected. But when you select a new landing page, keep in mind that it "might" be affected. It will probably go up, given that Google is bound to think their own tool is doing good things, and they want access to your data so they want you to use the tool, and a reputation for it killing quality scores would not be much incentive to use it. So does that mean conversion rates are now going to be part of quality score? No? Or that this is a red herring and the use of Website Optimizer actually plays a negligible part in quality score? For the sake of simplicity and agnosticism as to what truly counts as "quality," I'm assuming the latter. A great user experience shouldn't necessarily be judged by predefined conversion events. So if you're scoring at home or office: I'm like thousands of others in that (1) I'll probably use this stuff, if they let me; (2) I'm afraid of the larger consequences, especially if Google begins to "organize and make universally accessible -- to itself -- the world's confidential marketing information". At least it's not causing global warming, that I know of. Google has that covered anyway, with their new Comments Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Furl Andrew Goodman is Principal of Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.