Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer: Not Quite a Perfect

How to make Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer play nice with each other.

The most annoying thing about both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer is that they don't work together "straight out of the box".

Simply pasting the code that the Optimizer gives you will cause several problems in Google Analytics which will basically kill all of your marketing data.

Setting up GA on its own to work properly is a task in itself, but when you add GWO on top of it, there are even more issues to deal with.

Here are the main issues:

1: GWO won't work with GA as it is. You have to customize the GWO code to work with GA.

2: GWO won't work with ecommerce sites unless you customize it further.

3: You'll get more problems if you use any sort of sub-domain.

4: The basic GWO code will destroy (overwrite) your GA tracking data leading to two problems.

a: You''l end up with no visitor tracking for anyone who comes via email, adwords, search, ppc etc visitors. In other words no campaign tracking.

b: GA will start double counting all visits.

All of the above can be solved with a bit of work, but the problems and solutions aren't mentioned when you're setting up your GWO experiments.

You find out the hard way when you look at your analytics data and see that none of your campaigns are working.

Then you have to go trawling thru the forums and blogs to find out how to fix them all.

There's some more to it, but I'll save that for another discussion.