I must say, as a long time fan/user of Google Website Optimizer (GWO), I'm extremely disappointed Google is gettind rid of it and replacing it with Google Experiments.
Since we are being forced on the transition, I did a test experiment with Google Experiments. The biggest drawback I found was the added tracking that they attach to the end of a URL. So for example, if I set up an experiment on http://example.com/index.html and http://example.com/index-b.html , when I visit example.com in my browser it could appear as...
http://example.com/indexb.html?utm_expid=3801549-1
This change in URL is enough to throw off some visitors and adds an extra variable, making it impossible to get true split testing.
With Google Website Optimizer, you were able to setup a multivariate experiment that wouldn't change the URL. I could set up an experiment for http://example.com/index.html, put the code from http://example.com/index-b.html in GWO, then, every time I visited my site it would come up as http://example.com/index.html, showing both versions of the page under that one URL.
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The next obvious complaint is not having Multivariate experiments. This was invaluable when trying to test multiple things on a page at the same time. With Google Experiments, this lost feature limits our options of what we can do in testing.
Finally, it says in my Google Analytics account that experiments are limited to 3 months. I've had many experiments that take longer than 3 months for Google to declare a winner. While most of my experiments do finish in under 3 months, this is just another thing I have to worry about if I want to do testing with Google Experiments.
What do you think, do you share or oppose my complaints?
[edited by: tedster at 9:42 pm (utc) on Jul 3, 2012]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]
