Pulling the Levers

Digital applications are becoming more mainstream as business tools tools.

Marketers are starting to realise that the modern website is becoming the strategic digital backbone to all their marketing activities and requires extensive investment in terms of thinking and management.

Several years ago I went to Silicon Valley's Palo Alto to understand what was going on in leading edge the interactive world of the web. I interviewed a Ramesh from a company called PB Wiki, and he talked about “pulling the levers”; testing different combinations and variables to see which elicited the best response from their target audience, and optimised their web application’s usability.

With the modern web enabling our audiences to participate in our business world using the web, there is also a high level of risk if we get our digital marketing wrong. It is therefore important, not only to ensure that we get the right people to find our website, but also to have it optimised so that the target market’s behaviour is most beneficial to our company in terms of sales conversions, loyalty or even just ensuring that they get the information that they need.

Multivariate Testing

In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment to determine which of multiple content variations performs better.

Multivariate testing is used in order to ascertain which content or creative variation produces the best improvement in the defined goals of a website, whether that be user registrations or successful completion of the buying process.

Dramatic increases can be seen through testing different processes, workflow, content, form layouts and even landing page images and background colours. However, not all elements produce the same increase in conversions, and by looking at the results from different tests, it is possible to identify those elements that consistently tend to produce the greatest increase in conversions.

Testing can be carried out on a dynamically generated website by setting up the server to display the different variations of the site in equal proportions to incoming visitors. Statistics on how each visitor went on to behave after seeing the content being tested are be gathered and analysed.

Multivariate testing allows website visitors to vote with their clicks for which content they prefer and will stand the most chance of them proceeding to a defined goal. The testing is transparent to the visitor with all commercial solutions capable of ensuring that each visitor is shown the same content on every visit.

Some websites benefit from constant optimisation as visitor response to creatives and layouts differ by time of day, week or even season.

Multivariate testing is currently an area of high growth in Internet marketing as it helps website owners to ensure that they are getting the most from the visitors arriving at their site. Areas such as search engine optimisation (SEO), Social Media Optimisation (SMO) and advertising bring visitors to a site and have been extensively used by many organisations but multivariate testing allows internet marketers to ensure that visitors are being effectively serviced once they arrive at the site.

As we get better at assessing the digital environment, managing the website becomes less random experimentation and more like the controlled flight of an aeroplane by an experienced pilot.