Testing is essential for optimisation, whether it be for an email campaign or a landing page on your website. It helps website owners to achieve the full potential from their online initiatives.
A/B and multivariate testing are techniques to test the optimum combination of multiple factors within a web page or email to achieve the desired customer behaviour.
A/B testing is the simpler option – testing one change against another; while multivariate testing allows you to test any number of different factors, and isolate each factor’s effect on conversion rates.
Multivariate testing has become a pivotal tool in a web analyst’s arsenal. With a number of vendor solutions on the market, it is becoming as simple as plug and play – and it should now form a central part of the web analyst’s ongoing quest for site optimisation.
Testing is a very important part of web analytics, as it ties in closely with segmentation and targeting. When performed effectively, it is one of the fastest ways to increase marketing ROI.
Posted on May 21st, 2008
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For most businesses, website maintenance means a redevelopment every three years or so – and not much else in between. Lessons learned from one upgrade are incorporated into the next release, and the website improves… very slowly.
Using this model, the time between identifying a problem and resolving it to unlock value can be as long as three years. Clearly, this is not ideal.
Fortunately, along came Web 2.0. One of the main principles of Web 2.0 product development, which has underwritten the rapid rise and success of its products, is the concept of ‘always beta’.
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