Website Optimizer: What Traffic Does it Track? What Kind of Test is it?

I've seen these questions come up on various boards and such:

What traffic does Google Optimizer track? Does it only track AdWords?

Google Optimizer tracks and does the multivariant testing on all incoming traffic, regardless of source. You need an AdWords account because all the tracking and G analytics horsepower is housed within AdWords - Google Optimizer leverages off of this...why reinvent the wheel?


What Type of Testing Does it Do? (Taguchi, A/B, etc)

I've seen a lot of misinformation on this topic. Particularly around Taguchi - it seems that a lot of folks in the Internet Marketing world are a bit confused here.

Here is quick explanation:

Factorial Experiments allow you to test multiple 'factors' with multiple 'choices'. For example, a factor could be an image on a landing page and a choice would be various images being swapped.

Now, outside of automated efficient electronic type of testing, such as testing physical operations like machines or chemicals, the tests become very expensive with the more factors and choices you add. Remember permutations? The possible number of combinations expands greatly with each new factor and choice of factor.

So, we have "Fractional Factorials" which in a nut shell limit the amount of total combinations via statistics needed to get a meaningful result. Taguchi is a form of fractional factorial experiments.

So back to the web - It costs nothing more to do 10 factors with 20 choices then it does to do 2 factors with 2 choices....so there is no need for a fractional method like Taguchi.

Google Optimizer uses a full factorial method, where the factors are the "test sections" and the choices are the "variants" on a given experiment page.


Hope this helps,

Meegwell