Google Website Optimizer - a Win-Win

By: Andrew Goodman | Source: webpronews.com

Like a few others, I’ve been beta testing Google Website Optimizer. It’s great.

Here’s why it’s a win for Google. They’ll make more revenue because marketers who test will get impatient and need more data. They’ll enable their paid search accounts fully, possibly even enabling marginally performing groups, to get a statistically significant conclusion to their test more quickly so they can move on.

[via Search engine optimization and Online marketing. ]

I’m interested in Website Optimizer, too, though Google haven’t yet replied to my application for an account. I can’t say I’m quite as enthusiastic as Andrew Goodman, because Optimizer appears to solve only part of the split testing problem, making it a service that’ll be used mainly by a small sector of internet marketers.

The trouble is that to use it you have to paste code into your HTML pages. But most webmasters, especially those who are engaged in selling stuff online, don’t create their pages using plain ol’ vanilla HTML: instead, they have content management systems to do that for them.

The other problem with Optimizer is that it uses javascript to generate variant content dynamically. That content comes from a Google server. Rationally or not, many webmasters are not going to like relying on an external site to deliver parts of their precious pages for them. A selling headline that doesn’t appear because of a backbone router hiccup? No thanks!

For these reasons I don’t think Optimizer is going to wipe the floor with its rivals like Vertster and SiteSpect right away, even though Google’s offering is free in its basic form. A free service that’s very fiddly to use simply isn’t going to excite potential customers.

While we’re on the subject, take a look at my new blog about split testing. Whatever else Optimizer does in the market it’s bound to create something of a buzz around the subject, so I thought I’d try and catch some of it. Bzzz!

Phorum and Drupal are two of my favourite open source software packages. Phorum is in my opinion the best of the many PHP-based standalone forum products, while Drupal is my favoured CMS.

Drupal is not without its headaches, and one of them is its own built in forum, which is not very flexible. It also fails to work at all if you install certain Drupal add-ons. This was my position in the middle of last week: having committed to providing forum functionality for a site, but unable to get it working.

Since I am comfortable with Phorum my immediate thought was to look for a way of integrating it and fortunately most of the work had already been done by Maurice Makaay, one of the most energetic contributors to the development of Phorum. He’d written a piece of code which makes it possible to embed Phorum inside other applications, so all I needed to do was to supply the appropriate wrapper for Drupal, which took about a day and a half’s work.

The phorum integration code is now available as a Drupal module. I hope some other folk will find it useful.