Google's Website Optimizer - Let the Games Begin, again.

Last fall, Google announced that it was beta testing its Google Website Optimizer. Beginning today, the optimizer is in general release and available to everybody.

Tom Leung, the product manager for Google's Website Optimizer, says in a ClickZ article: "The main problem we're trying to solve is to get people out of the dark ages in terms of how they develop pages. All too often, they'll just put a page together and maybe the designer will do a few mock-ups, and they'll point to the one they feel is going to be the best one."

Sound familiar? It's the "Test, don't guess" philosophy we've been championing for three years. Google should be telling telling advertisers that optimizing is a smart thing to do, because even though most advertisers realize that testing and optimizing landing pages can improve results substantially, having Google say Do it amounts to a marching order for many. There is virtually no amount of marketing budget that I could spend that would be as validating.

On the other hand, Leung's implication that Google's solution can replace large-scale platforms like ours is misguided. "One of those guys can theoretically handle 100,000 page variations. We go up to 10,000," he says in the ClickZ article. He adds that a marketer testing that many variations would be in the .001 percentile. But (perhaps intentionally) he misses the point. He's right that marketers for the most part don't need to test 100,000 variations.

What marketers do need, however, is the ability to test things beyond the landing page. A marketer needs to be able to test an offer on a landing page and then draw that offer through the user's next step, and his next, to include it on internal pages within the site. They need the ability to test the offer within the site, and to continue to optimize the site's internal pages based on the test's results.

So am I concerned about Google's optimizer? When a company with $10B in cash enters your market, things are going to change, and we over here at Offermatica may be delusional, but we are not stupid.

But I trust that the market is (mostly) rational, and so I am very optimistic that this will be continue the surge in interest for Offermatica's testing and targeting service.

Why? Because quite simply, more people need to do testing, and a free tool for a small business is a great start.  For the brands we serve,

1. Offermatica integrates well with the leaders in analytics, WebTrends, Omniture, and CoreMetrics, and can even deliver content to segments derived from these systems.

2. Google's freebie tool is for Google Adwords. Offermatica is for Google, Yahoo, and MSN  -- not to mention display ads, email, affiliates and any other source of traffic, and can be used both externally and internally within your site.

3. As we have covered in What is Optimization, discrete testing is important, but ongoing content targeting and personalization must follow quickly behind.

4. And, as Bryan Eisenburg pointed out during the eMetrics show, "The Page is Dead". If you want better advertising, you have do more that just single page content-switching.

We continue to be passionate about not only providing the highest-performing testing and targeting application for companies like Intuit and C*net, but also providing the kind of marketing guidance and service through our own team and our partners like Camelot, Zaaz, Range Online Media, Wunderman, Digital Grit and others that are leaders in interactive and search marketing.

I want to be clear. Hats off to the team. Truly. We are passionate about better online marketing, we appreciate Google's participation, and we toast their success. Marketers must get into the mold of testing more often, and it cannot happen fast enough.

There is no looking back now, marketing is now officially beyond the site.