Customer Reviews

Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As an experienced web marketer, I felt compelled to write a negative review for this book. In short, I found the book to be a complete and total waste of my time. In my years of working within the web-marketing field, I've never read a book that was as completely inept as this book. It was almost as if the authors wanted to write ten books but they crammed all of their ideas in one book and provided no depth to their ideas.

The book starts off logically by explaining the reasons and benefits for testing of your website. The concepts make sense; you should always be trying to improve the conversion rate of your website. So far so good. The second chapter explains some of the Google Website Optimizer's features and functions. Within the chapter, the authors explain how to set up a test and they also explain the various types of test that you can perform with the Google Website Optimizer Tool.

Where things start to go wrong is in the middle of the second chapter. After explaining how to perform a simple headline test using the Google Website Optimizer tool, the authors proceed to present 30 examples of headlines they think might work in certain situations. The problem I have with this is that they give no explanation for the use of certain headlines. They simply list 30 examples and expect you to put two and two together. This issue is a recurring theme throughout the rest of the book.

From this point on, the authors proceed to talk about projects that they have completed with their clients along with the results of their tests. While this may be impressive to the authors, it has absolutely no meaning to me. Showing me how to drive a car fast isn't the same as me sitting in the driver's seat and learning how to drive fast with the proper tutelage. I'll need hands on training if I'm going to succeed. The authors strangely skip the teaching/training step throughout the booklet. On numerous occasions, they speak about certain skills that are required to learn but they conclude by giving an example of one of their completed work projects. This is incredibly frustrating when you are in 'learn mode.' The authors do very little to explain why they performed certain actions at certain times. As a reader that wants to learn, I'm more interested in learning why you made certain decisions as apposed to reading the final decision you made.

The remainder of the book (with the exception of Part II 'What you should test') is a 'mish mash' of ideas that have no depth or relation to each other. Strangely, very little of this book actually (I'd say about 20% of the book) relates to the Google Website Optimizer tool.

This book is disjointed and seemingly scrambled at times. At best, some of the chapters are completely nebulous in value. On numerous occasions, the author asks questions like:

- How exactly will a redesigned site better serve visitors?
- Why are the best-converting sites so often boring in their design?
- Who needs to be persuaded?
- How will you most effectively persuade that person?

I've never read a book that asked as many questions without providing the answers. The authors continually use this strategy thought the book. This book is a painful read.

If you choose to purchase this book, you will be left with more questions than answers.

Clearly the authors are both very intelligent people. The problem with this book is that (in my opinion) the authors expect you to get all the answers by listing all of their work projects without listing proper instructions or giving proper testing principals.

This is an awful book.

For years companies have tried to develop THE best website, even shamelessly copying from the so called "best of breed". The reality is although technology can be copied, although business processes can be inspired from best practices, humans can't be that easily copied. If one of the distinctive element of any company is its workforce, the decisive factor of success is understanding the client. And the only way to know if your website works for your clients is to test, measure and optimize your Persuasion Architecture®. A continuous improvement process isn't complete until we reach 100% success... in the meantime, read this book, learn a whole lot about testing, see what others are doing, and get plentiful of ideas to get going!

Although the book titles states "Google Website Optimizer", the book is really an excellent introduction to the concept of A/B and multivariate testing.