Unusual Google Website Optimizer Bug - Check Your Code
Today, Google announced that it would be holding a website optimizer competition where you can win a partnership with a website optimizer to improve your sites ROI. The “webSite workout” competition is open only to those in the US (What’s new?) as advertisers outside the great United States don’t really spend that much on advertising. ;)
Anyway, for those of you who use the Google Website Optimizer and for those of you considering using it for this competition, there are some unpublished problems with the tool that you should be aware of. From a very trusted source who wishes to remain anonymous:
As you have seen from my CC’d emails to youI have been having a battle with Google regarding the web page optimizer and data discrepancies. Until recently they just denied the problem was on their end.
I can now share two things with you that are very important moving forward when implementing WEB OPTIMIZER:
- 1. When entering the URLs of the test pages be very careful not to paste a blank space in at the end of the URL. It is almost impossible to check once the URL is entered and totally screws up optimizer reports.
- 2. Be aware that there is an issue that Google has tried to hide.The Web Optimizer (WO) code can conflict with the Google Analytics (ga) code. The work around is discussed below.
The following was the eventual reply/workaround from Google:
We suspect that you are seeing conversion discrepancies because your conversion page contains instances of ga.js and urchin.js for Analytics and Website Optimizer, respectively. Having both codes on one page can cause reporting issues. To smooth out the discrepancy, please modify the ga.js code for use with WO, rather than adding a call to urchin.js as well.
Please have a look at the following article:
http://www.google.com/support/websiteoptimizer/bin/answer.py?answer=77075Option 2 will soon be phased out soon, so please only focus on Option 1, which details how to update your Analytics ga.js code to run for WO as well. Hopefully this is straightforward and corrects the issue. Keep in mind that we’ll have to focus on data from the date of the code correction going forward…
To those of you using Google Website Optimizer and are noticing anything strange, double check everything above. I know this is a little off the general topic of this blog but the issue has been a constant source of headaches and inaccurate reporting for months now.
* Source and Google rep names have been removed.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I wonder, would Google unleash something that is not working? I must admit, even with the PPC that I have found them to be a bit slow sometimes, and, finding some things not working. The reply I got all the time is that it was most probably my browser. I don´t know. Thanks for the warning and article.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Yes, thanks Dave, those are helpful details.
June 14th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
I wonder, would Google unleash something that is not working? joking surely,plenty of new features with google tend to have bugs that take varying degrees of time to iron out, Dave ,bit off topic, whats your take on googles apparent ad partnership {in the pipeline}with yahoo after the yahoo / microsoft breakup,for america canada to begin with, surely cant be good,birth of monopoly ?{if it gets past the fed gov}
June 15th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
It is a little unusual for Google to release something that doesn’t work properly. Normally they’re very good at ironing out all the bugs before going live, although I have recently heard about problems with new features for Google Mail… hopefully Google isn’t dropping its standards. But thanks for the warning about Google Website Optimizer.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Hopefully this problem will be fix as much as possible and I think if this is true, then Google should be aware. Anyway, thanks for the information.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I feel it’s a fair call from google but it will affect millions of SEO’s and blog creators.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Thanks for raising those two points. I have been recommending WO to my list, so your findings are very useful.
July 29th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Wow interesting article. Checking my code now :-)