The past couple of weeks I’ve been using Google’s website optimizer as part of their beta test.

Overall, I’m very impressed. From a business perspective this make so much sense. Anything that can improve a site’s conversion rate is a true win-win for Google and the advertiser. We get more sales, our cost per sale goes down and then we can afford to bid more on words that already work and convert marginal keywords from the loosing money to the making money pile.

Google is already providing excellent tools to help advertisers improve the performance of their AdWords campaigns. As always, they are ahead of the everyone else, by understanding that in order for them to succeed, they needs their customers (AdWords advertisers) to succeed.

I’m impressed with their implementation of the tool itself. I’ve used other split testing tools before, like, but I really, really like Google’s solution. I encountered one of their initial bugs which was very annoying at first, but it’s been fixed. They’ve also recently improved the integration with Google Analytics.

I do have a couple of “gripes”.

First and foremost, they should have named it something other than “Google Website Optimizer”. The name is too generic. When I did a search for Google Website Optimizer (no quotes) most of the results I got deal with optimizing your website for Google. A search with quotes got me better results, but ultimately, I think they should have gone with a name that’s unique enough so searches will return relevant results. For example, AdWords, AdSense and Gmail are all unique names.

I can’t think of anything really good for a new name, but here are some ideas:

  • Googimizer
  • OptiGoogle (scratch that, sounds to much like OptiMost, a different split testing service)
  • Gwoptimizer
  • GWO (scratch that to, sounds to much like GWB (George W Bush).
  • Gsplit

I have some inside secrets that I’d like to share but I need to confirm with our Google rep. before I can talk about it 😉

If you have any questions about Google Website Optimizer, please feel free to ask.