Google Website Optimizer v 1.0 The Techie Guide - Manual (Page 3)

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The Techie Guide to Google Website Optimizer
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Welcome to The Techie Guide for Google Website Optimizer™ (GWO) This guide will help you integrate GWO
into any website and test almost anything.
You’ll find detailed technical information on what GWO does and how it works. We’ll cover integration issues
(“Where exactly do I put the GWO code?”) and setup issues (“How do I create an experiment using a non-
standard setup?”). We’ll show you how to launch simple experiments and full-on hairy scenarios.
We’ll also look behind the scenes at an experiment in operation. You’ll see how the elements you install
actually work when the experiment is launched.
By the end of this guide you should have enough information so that the only thing limiting your testing is
your imagination.
Prerequisites
This is a technical guide. We assume that you, dear reader:
• Know how to edit HTML files
• Have a basic understanding of JavaScript
• Understand how cookies work
The more advanced stuff also requires experience with server side programming like PHP or ASP.
When giving examples, we’ll refer to the site you’re testing as www.mysite.com.
We may, at whim, abbreviate Google Website Optimizer as GWO and Google Analytics as GA. We will also, at
times, abbreviate multivariate testing as MVT and A/B testing as simply A/B.
Future Compatibility
Though this guide provides “inside” information on how GWO works, Website Optimizer is an evolving
product. Information in this document may become stale in the future, and experiment designs using this
information may not work as intended after some future date. This does not mean that certain types of
experiments will become impossible in the future, only that some assumptions will no longer hold true, and
that there will be different ways to achieve the same ends.
We should emphasize here that deviating from the “out of the box” methods for creating experiments should
always involve testing a technique and previewing pages to ensure a good user experience.
Updates and Revisions
The Techie Guide is a living document. We intend to update both it and GWO with the latest tricks from our
engineers and the Website Optimizer community. You can always find the latest version of the Techie Guide
at www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/techieguide .