Google launched its Google Website Optimiser service in October 2006.
The service is designed to enable the effectiveness of different versions of webpages to be objectively measured. It can be used in conjunction with Adwords’ conversion (return on investment) tracking information to improve Adwords landing pages.
Google has made easily accessible to small an medium sized businesses a level of user-interaction testing that has previously typically only been carried out by larger organisations.
The service requires that page elements under test are brought into the pager using javascript, which means their content will generally not be spidered by the search engines. This makes it inadvisable to use the new service on pages which rely on organic search engine positioning for their traffic.
As this is a page orientated service the effectiveness of site wide changes such as the alterations to headers or positioning of adverts in templates cannot be monitored using this system.
Google’s information on the service can be found: