10 Responses

Tylor

January 28th, 2009 at 8:14 am

This sounds like a very interesting tool and I will definitely start taking a look at it and see if I can’t start using it more.

All of my websites, that I make, are also dynamic. So, I would be very interested if you shared some videos on how you made the work for you.

Keep up the great work,
Tylor

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Brian Armstrong

January 29th, 2009 at 2:45 pm

Hi Tyler,

For right now I was only able to test static text. Anything within a php tag < ? ?> or rails tag < % %> I couldn’t figure out how to test.

But subscribe to this thread in the google support forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/websiteoptimizer/thread?fid=11a2583205f65b910004617c680b0028&hl=en

They should be announcing some details on that soon.

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Tylor

January 29th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

Awesome! Thanks for your help. I am looking forward to the Teckie Guide they mentioned.

Also -if you are looking for more stuff to write about- I would love to hear more about how you use googles products to help with your sites. Videos, tutorials etc…

Keep up the great work,
Tylor

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Brian Armstrong

February 11th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

Thanks Tylor! I’ll definitely put together more if/when I see something that would be useful.

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Carolyn

January 28th, 2009 at 5:35 pm

Love this tool! Hadn’t heard of it before you mentioned it.

Try adding the state abbreviation and the state spelled out to your list of cities. Although I like the simpler look of city listed alone, simpler doesn’t necessarily win in the search rankings.

Will be interested to hear about how your future experiments turn out!

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Brian Armstrong

January 29th, 2009 at 2:46 pm

Good idea Carolyn. I don’t think there is any way to do a split test with your Google rankings for SEO purposes, but this would be really cool if you could. I wonder if Google would ever consider building something like this into WSO (they tend to discourage some SEO techniques).

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Mike

February 5th, 2009 at 10:52 pm

Hi Brian, I’m a big fan of your blog and your ambition – keep them both up! I’m fascinated by all of your ideas and I think it’s great you keep your theories rooted in reality. I’d like to get started down your path, but I’m neither a programmer or developer. As they say, I know enough about the web to be dangerous, but probably not enough to get out of danger. Can you please give me any tips you have on getting started in testing business ideas and web models without having these technical skills? I’d really appreciate it! Thanks, and again – keep up the great work! Hey, how is Argentina?!?!

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Brian Armstrong

February 11th, 2009 at 1:11 pm

Hi Mike, won’t be in Argentina till May. But that is fine if you aren’t technical, you can still do some of these things. My suggestion is to post a job on odesk.com (or one of the others like elance.com or guru.com) and find yourself a cheap technical guy somewhere in the world who will work for about $3/hr. You may have to test out a few of them by giving them a small project, interview about 5 or so. But then once you have a good guy, you can send him little tasks like this for cheap.

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Creer un site

February 11th, 2009 at 4:17 am

Did you test it for ads ? I guess the adsense on the top, is less than 1% CTR ?

and with text ads instead of image at the top of the article CTR whould increase also ?

I found ads just above the comment box is useless for me, but perhaps with US readers the result is different from French ones

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Brian Armstrong

February 11th, 2009 at 1:09 pm

I’ve done some adsense testing (not using Website Optimizer though). You can read more here: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/08/16/split-testing-how-to-increase-your-adsense-earnings-94-overnight/

Thanks!

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