I’m a big fan of Google Website Optimizer and we’ve found that most of our clients, not surprisingly, are enjoying the free price (and when I say “most”, it doesn’t mean that some don’t like the free price, just that they want to do more advanced testing that’s more practical with higher priced alternatives).

One issue I have, though, is with the 30-minute, single session cookie restriction. This rule means that Google Website Optimizer will only count a conversion if it occurs within 30 minutes and within the same session of viewing the test page.

So, if you visited my test page and saw one of 48 variable combinations, for example, and then 30 minutes later returned to the site to complete the transaction, you have a 98% probability (48/49, including the control) of seeing a different page combination. The problem is that the last combination is the only one that gets credited for the conversion, which shouldn’t necessarily be so.

This seems to be artificially oriented toward immediate impulse actions and may skew results.

I’ve passed this feedback on to Tom Leung (Google Website Optimizer Product Manager), and hope that they’ll be able to incorporate a change in the next Optimizer version, which I’m eagerly awaiting, I should add!

Ideally, we should be able to easily set our own rules for the timespan and persistence of the cookie based on the clients’ particular business rules and product purchase cycle.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 8:30 pm and is filed under google website optimizer, tom leung, website optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.