Google Website Optimizer helps non-IT specialists carry out their own split-testing. It performs the following functions:
1. It ‘splits’ the traffic, that is, it directs each visitor, in realtime to a different version of the testing page.
2. It handles the presentation of each different page to the client in the case of A/B split testing where A and B are simply different pages. It also handles changing the DOM model of a page for Multi Variant (MV) split testing where the same page is used but with the DOM elements of the page differently configured.
3. It keeps track of the conversions for each page variation.
4. When it has the records of visitors to each page variation, and the number of conversions on each variation it carries out the number crunching and delivers the results as an easy to understand, color coded report (where green is good, red is bad and orange is ok-ish).
5. It handles cookies, so that each visitor gets the same page variant version on return visits and the performance of the different versions can be reliably calculated.