Google Website Optimizer and Joomla 1.5

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Jul

2008

Google Website Optimizer and Joomla 1.5

Written by Steve Burge

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.

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

#1 Muhammad Sudirman 2008-07-15 22:29

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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#2 David Towers 2008-07-16 04:24

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

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#3 Steve Burge 2008-07-16 07:53

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

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#4 Stephen Moseley 2008-07-16 12:50

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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#5 Barrie North 2008-07-17 08:17

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

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#6 Stephen Moseley 2008-07-17 11:29

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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#7 Barrie North 2008-07-22 14:15

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

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#8 Stephen Moseley 2008-07-22 14:17

Thanks Barrie - look forward to seeing your results

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