If you’ve been to my website in the past month you’ve been part of an A/B split test. Half of you saw the Blonde, surfy looking girl and half of you saw a office-y looking Brunette Eurasian. The experiment via the now defunct (as of the morning) Google Website Optimiser then measured which girl got more domain name searches via the header.

Although I don’t have enough data gathered to date to be 95% confident, the initial result shows that the blonde performs three times as well as the brunette, and accounts for almost 75% of all domain searches on the site in the last 30 days.

Sorry brown-eyed girl, I’m not a white supremacist … but the data has spoken. The blonde is going to make me more money.  

This morning Google Announced that Website Optimiser, the service I used to run the split test, will be closed. Instead it will be integrated as “Experiments” within Analytics itself which is fantastic. With some advanced tracking you could already do this but now experiments will be automatically connected to your goals and traffic analysis. The only drawback so far is that it can only run 5 A/B split tests and no “multivariate” tests which allowed you to run many combinations of design changes at once.

If you need any help with your Analytics or would like to run an experiment like this on your website, contact DNA Digital.