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Some very good news from the Joomla 1.5 world today ... Google Website Optimizer now works with Joomla 1.5.

If you haven't tried it yet, Website Optimizer is a tool for testing different versions of your site to see which one produces a higher conversion rate.

Thanks to Anthony from Joomla Performance and Barrie from Compass Designs for their work on this.

• Original forum post
• Bug tracker item
• Download the patch

Joomla 1.0?

Currently the only option for using Google Website Optimizer with Joomla 1.0 is a mambot called Opt-Bot. Unfortunately its the very picture of a bad Open Source business model:

• Its over $100 for three small files (you pay separately for 1.0 and 1.5)
• All files are completely encoded
• The license will shut your site down if it stops working
• Support questions in the forum are all unanswered

Hopefully a free solution for 1.0 will be available shortly.

Updates

• Anthony asked me to emphasise that you need a patch for 1.5.4 but this will be native in 1.5.5.
• Barrie asked me to point out his new tutorial with a detailed explanation of how to use GWO with Joomla.

Comments (10)

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written by Muhammad Sudirman, July 15, 2008

Thanks a lot for valuable information.

Sometimes, I feel unlucky in finding good info / tips from large forum like forum.joomla.org.

Nice post.

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written by Good Web Practices, July 16, 2008

Fantastic news! This is a great way to really measure the effect of changes made to our Joomla sites!

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written by Steve Burge, July 16, 2008

You're welcome guys ... I'm just reporting on the hard work of others here

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written by Stephen Moseley, July 16, 2008

I've seen and heard of GWO, but haven't come up with a good way in my head to use it. Seems like you'd have to be ok with varied designs of your site. Seems like if you wanted to do it right, it would take a good bit of time to setup the experiment - but I guess that depends on what you are varying.

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written by Barrie North, July 17, 2008

Its not too hard. The difficult part is coming up with the experiment, and writing the multiple copies....

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written by Stephen Moseley, July 17, 2008

Barrie - thanks for the comment... and the article on your site. It really answered a lot of questions for me about GWO.

Yeah I guess the experiment part is what I was thinking of as far as "time" goes. Seems like there are a LOT of variables on the page you could choose. What does it allow you to change? Content within the tags on the page? From the example on your site, it seems like you type in the HTML you want for that given "success" page, is that correct?

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written by Barrie North, July 22, 2008

I have some testing going on right now. I'll have to blog about it, the results are really surprising.....

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written by Stephen Moseley, July 22, 2008

Thanks Barrie - look forward to seeing your results

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written by Nicolas, July 28, 2008

Thanks This site is really usefull, I didn't know it exists.

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written by Justin Goodwin, October 09, 2008

Google Optimizer had come out in 2006 but I had never heard of it until today. I wonder why it hasn't been pushed harder?

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