A very, very, interesting new product from Google just launched: Google Website Optimizer
They boast that it can perform multivariate tests of landing page content in order to increase website conversions. In non-marketer speak, that means that you can send people to different versions of your website’s landing page, each with a different mix of text and graphics. You can then track whether or not you got a purchase/registration/subscription from each person who landed, and thus quantify the added benefit of each different combination of web page pieces.
It’s all pretty automatic, and can be integrated into static HTML or dynamic pages. As far as I can tell, Google actually routes people from their site to a special version of your page, and drives the conversion tracking through their excellent analytics package.
This is a big deal, if you ask me. This puts randomized marketing tests into the hands of everybody with a website. There’s no longer an excuse to not perform tests all the time to keep improving your site’s relevance to websurfers who come across it.
And no, I won’t be doing that for iNik.net. I mean, hey, I don’t need your money, I do this for the love of reading what I write.