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Introducing the Website Optimizer Experiment Management API

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 10/20/2009 11:55:00 AM

Today at the eMetrics conference in Washington DC we announced the new Website Optimizer Experiment Management API. The API allows for the creation and management of experiments outside of the Website Optimizer interface. I'd like to share a bit about why we are so excited about the API.

Today, creating and launching a Website Optimizer experiment is a series of steps. Depending on the design of your website, the content you want to test, and how savvy you are, these steps can be easy and quick or potentially difficult.

One of the most important steps in creating an experiment is adding the Website Optimizer tags to the test pages. This step can be problematic if your website uses a content management system or a third party shopping cart since it can be difficult to directly access the code for these pages.

With the Website Optimizer Experiment Management API, these platforms can integrate Website Optimizer directly into their services. Today we have two platforms that are launching their integrations: CrownPeak and Blast Advanced Media's Motivity CMS.

Both integrations allow you to create and launch Website Optimizer experiments without touching your website's code. Many other platforms are working on integrating with Website Optimizer, and we're excited about helping more businesses increase their conversion rates through website testing.

Getting Started with the API
If you'd like to learn more about using the Website Optimizer API, we've got a number of resources for you. First and foremost is the Website Optimizer API site on Google Code. There you'll find complete documentation on the API and our Getting Started guide.

We also have set up a special Google Group for the Website Optimizer Experiment Management API. It's a place where you can discuss implementations and get questions answered. Visit the group here: http://groups.google.com/group/gwo-api/.

Upcoming Webinar
Lastly, we'd like to invite you to join us for a special webinar on the Website Optimizer Experiment Management API. The webinar will be held on October 28th at 10AM PDT. During the webinar, Website Optimizer engineers will walk you through how the API works. Also Blast Advanced Media and CrownPeak will demonstrate how they've integrated Website Optimizer into their platforms.

You need to register for the webinar, which you can do here: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=577316679. We'll record the webinar as well so you can reference it later.

We're very excited about the Website Optimizer API and what it means for website testing. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Posted by Trevor Claiborne, Website Optimizer team

6 comments:

Milkshake Commerce said...

This is great news. We've integrated our software with WSO by using the installation URL to grep scripts.

One thing we still need, is to be able to get statistics of all running experiments through
the API.

Michael Kjeldsen said...

Why didn't I hear about this sooner? I mean, I knew it was bound to come, but that you had com eTHIS far - exciting!

Trevor Claiborne said...

A data API will come later, but for now we're focusing on the creating and launching of experiment.

Ken Colborn said...

See how we cut the steps down from 11 to only 3 steps with the GWO API. View our Google Website Optimizer API integration with Motivity CMS/Ecommerce Presentation from eMetrics 2009 in DC: http://bit.ly/gwoapi

Anonymous said...

When will the Webinar become available for those that could not make the show?

james said...

how flexible is the API? is it able to deal with dynamic data?
for example, if i have a series of similarly laid out pages but want to test various layout elements and/or meta-data, is that accessible?

the GWO is awesome and i'm implementing it for my static pages but i don't understand how to do multivariate testing for dynamically built pages.

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