I was just reading this liveblog of the organic listings forum at SES NYC and I noticed this in a discussion about cloaking:
Dave: As a safeguard, download Google Website Optimizer and check your site.
I hope this was either a) a joke, or b) a miss-type.
Let’s say you’ve got a website. Consumer e-commerce. You get lots of visitors and you have lots of pages. Most of your traffic is from search engines, and your keyword range is wide, with a natural head-tail power law curve to it. Some of these people buy things, most do not and like any other business owner, you want to figure out how to make more people buy stuff from you. Nothing on the site is broken, or screams for help, like broken search or poor navigation and the site does sell a few things, just not a lot.
For me, the key has been segmenting visitors into behavioral cross sections. Like I’ll first look at the keywords the…
I just got finished audio-booking pollster Frank Luntz’s new book Words that Work. While I’m very different from Luntz politically (he’s the guy who renamed the estate tax to the death tax, and is anti-”illegal immigration”) I’m absolutely fascinated by his work with language, specifically his testing methods. The book is a great read/listen especially for an online marketing professional who relies on words and images entirely to sell a product or a viewpoint, lots of great stuff in there.
But what really piques my interest in Luntz, and has since I first became aware of him when I watched the documentary “The Persuaders”, is his testing methods and how they overlap with the split and multivariate testing stuff…
After surviving the webmaster deathmatch at pubcon Las Vegas, we were able to secure beta access to Google’s sweet new multivaritate testing system, Google website optimizer. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I’m liking it so far. For a free product, its awesome, but it does seem very beta still. Here’s a couple of points of contention I have with it:
Once you start an experiment, there’s no way to edit variations or any of the other experiment settings, and if you stop an experiment you can’t restart it, you have to create a new one from scratch.
In creating an experiment the only way to specify page sections to test is by putting section…
Get my 22 page report full of scientifically proven ways to get more ReTweets by subscribing to my blog via email.
