I’ve been kicking the tyres of Google Website Optimizer recently and while I’ve been impressed at how slick and simple it makes split testing overall it does have a few flaws. The fact I can’t define landing on another site as a conversion action is one, and Google’s apparent inability to get the most relevant page ranking for a search for Google Website Optimizer is another minor irritation.

Throw some love at www.Google.com/WebsiteOptimizer please Google folks? It’s clearly the best and most relevant URL for the query, in my opinion at least

Anyhow, minor irritations aside I’m digging GWO, but god damn if it didn’t make me think I was losing it a few days ago. I was checking some client stats one morning and saw a 40,000 visitor jump over the average. Huzzah! says I, before going off get a celebratory beer while composing a text to Dave about how much I deserve a pay rise

Back at my computer 10 minutes later and my extra 80,000 eyeballs attached to wallets have dissapeared. WTF? Good job I didn’t send that text! After messing around in Analytics for a while trying to recreate what I’d seen I chalked it up partly to wishful thinking & mostly to my being slightly *ahem* “fuzzy headed”.

So when I saw a similar jump this morning while I’m bright eyed, bushy tailed and a lot less “fuzzy” I paid a bit more attention and took a screen cap to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. Sure enough an extra ~40,000 visits showing on the graph that disappeared a few hours later.

This only began a few days ago, right when we started testing Website Optimizer on this and other sites, so I’m guessing it’s the usual Analytics backfill but much more pronounced because they’re wiping off tens of thousands of double logged visits from pages we’re split testing?

No big deal really, but we recently added an extra ~50,000 visitors per day to the site and I thought we’d managed another big bump for them. C’est La Vie…looks like I’m going to have to do some actual work to get them their next big boost.