The Evolution of Google Website Optimizer: 3 Great New Features

It’s nice to see our friends at GWO are listening. Just in the past week or two, they’ve made three notable improvements.

 

1. Experimenter Notes

The Settings page now includes a text field in which you can add your own annotations. This is very handy for quickly jotting down hypotheses, noting external factors that might affect an ongoing test, or debriefing a completed experiment. It’s also an easy way for team members to keep each other apprised as to where a project stands. It’s especially handy for those of us who usually have several experiments running at the same time.

2. PDF Results

Sharing results is now easier! Once an experiment is complete, you no longer have to take screenshots, export data to a spreadsheet or share results via AdWords. Now, you can just click the PFD icon on the experiment’s Reports page. Very cool.

 

3. Tracker Object Name Changes

Anyone involved in technical implementations will be especially pleased with this final improvement: Google has made small changes to the tracking and conversion scripts.

To track page views, GWO uses a tracker object (just like GA). This object was called pageTracker (just like GA). Which meant, that on pages that were running both GA and GWO, there were occasions (for example when using onClick tracking for your GA) that some GA data could be misdirected into GWO (because of the “shared” object name). Not good.

To prevent this, it became standard practice when setting up your GWO test to rename the pageTracker to something like “GWOpageTracker”, thus avoiding any potential conflict. No need any more though, as Google have updated the auto-generated GWO code so that pageTracker is now… drumroll please… “gwoTracker”. A small change, yes. But a very convenient one.

Best yet, this won’t have an impact on currently-running experiments. All experiments can continue to use the old pageTracker code… if that’s more your thing.