[LA.pm] Please review my A/B testing slides

[Ben Tilly]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Miguel Hernandez <migtek at gmail.com> wrote:
> I had some feedback (typos, basically), Ben, but I´m a bit late. How´d the
> presentation @ OSCON go?

A number of typos were found and fixed.  But still if you have any
more, send them in.

As far as I know it went well. :-)

> While not directly Perl-related, Google has a tool that also provides A/B
> testing (& even Multivariate testing). The Google Website Optimizer is a
> part of what they call the Google Trifecta (Webmaster Tools, Analytics &
> Optimizer).
> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/free-online-seminar-google-trifecta.html
> http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

The talk was not directly Perl related - it was in the web development
track.  The slides now have a couple of references to Website
Optimizer, and during the talk I discussed the tool and discussed its
limitations.

There are three important ones.  The first is that they are injecting
static text into your page, which makes it hard to A/B test dynamic
functionality.  The second is that you can't use their tool to A/B
test anything which you can't use JavaScript on - like the subject
lines of emails.  The third is that they do not support having
multiple metrics on a single A/B test.

If those are not show-stoppers for you, then by all means use it.  But
the talk was about how to set up your own tool that would be more
flexible.

> Lastly, I´m relatively new to the list & plan on attending my first meeting
> tonight so look forward to meeting you folks there.

I won't be there due to the same childcare constraints that kept me
from enjoying the rest of the conference. :-(

Cheers,
Ben