Author Archive

A well designed website separates content (text) from design (layout, colour, etc). Your content resides in your HTML pages and your design predominantly lives in the CSS style sheets written for the site.

Any website designer will tell you that perhaps the easiest thing to change on a website with the greatest visual impact is the colors. Most sites have a set of colors used to make up the site: background foreground, callouts, menu highlights, headings, link and visited links, header and footer, and probably much much more.

Changing the colours of a website is a simple matter of copying the style sheets and referencing the new style sheets in the site, and changing the colors in the new style sheets. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using Google optimizer for a while now, and it has its limitations. Of course being from Google it is well written and fairly well conceived. It is free after all.

Google have released a techie guide to Optimizer  - The Techie Guide to Google Website Optimizer.

The 26 page document, released by Google takes a comprehensive look at the Optimizer tool from a more techie angle - it’s well worth a look.

I’ve already learned a couple of things I didn’t know - thanks Google

Typical multivariate testing procedure

For any company interested in multivariate (global or local) testing, implementing experiments can be a challenge. Typically companies new to the idea tend to run A/B split testing to answer questions from their marketing team: “Is it worth using Google checkout?”. The in-house web development team or external agency will then set up the pages to answer this question: “Yes definitely”.

More savvy companies might offload a lot of the setup and use Google’s Website Optimizer, great, but lacking in some respects, or another hosted services. These look to address the problems with Google’s multivariate tool especially with combinatorial explosion (see comment #1), and therefore the potential gains can be well worth the outlay. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it’s not - multivariate analysis has been around for years and has been applied to other marketing channels for some time and with varying degrees of success; often with a great deal of success.

It’s not that multivariate analysis has not been a possibility, it just that it has not been adopted or at least widely adopted for website improvement.

I believe that there are four reasons for this: Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of valuable resources out there which discuss the benefits of increasing conversions as well as how to get started, however I have noticed there is a lack of tools for webmasters to use to optimise their sites. Much of this is down to the fact that MV testing is a fairly new field. It has only been in the last 4 years that tools have become available and browsers technically capable of handling these. In addition only huge companies such as Google have the resources to develop marketing tools and then release them for free.

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Thanks to Flikr for the Image

Companies tend to be myopic when it comes to KPI’s for search engine marketing.

Focusing on Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERP) [ref.], and appearing on page one of Google is an often stated by my clients as their ultimate success criteria. It is not uncommon, even, for some search engine marketing companies websites to claim to guarantee to get clients to the top three or top five.  So,  it’s not surprising that many companies (and individuals) have  their beady eyes on rankings only – to the detriment of their marketing and to the exclusion of anything else.

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Multivariate literally mean “multiple variables“. That is, a situation where more than one factor varies, where those factors define for us, in some way, the situation. Bivariate pertains to two variable specifically and Univariate to one. Read the rest of this entry »

The results show the importance of tailoring web sites to cultural preferences for sites that are intended for a multinational audience, says Greig Holbrook.

Oban Multilingual, the international search, SEO online marketing specialist, has completed its experiment to measure differences in responses to websites between different cultures.

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I’ll keep this short - I’ve been building websites for years and latterly have been involved in a number e-commerce websites that needed “optimising” for sales conversion. Out of this an interest in Multivariate content presentation has come about.

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