Comments on: How To Use Google Website Optimizer

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:06:31 +0000

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

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:11:28 +0000

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.

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:09:23 +0000

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!

By: Creer un site

Creer un site — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:17:30 +0000

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

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:52:30 +0000

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?!?!

By: Tylor

Tylor — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:08:00 +0000

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

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:46:52 +0000

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).

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:45:49 +0000

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.

By: Carolyn

Carolyn — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:35:44 +0000

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!

By: Tylor

Tylor — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:14:21 +0000

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