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Over the past few weeks I have come across many useful online resources related to multivariate testing and now the time has come to put together a little Top 10 list. This is recommended reading/viewing for all e-marketers, web developers and testers, newbies and pros alike, and it covers the subject from many different angles. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla Firefox has been experimenting for some time with A/B Split tests and multivariate testing to optimise the usability of their website, surveys etc. Their Blog of Metrics provides a very interesting read and so we have decided to add it to our blogroll.

A/B split tests by Mozilla Firefox

I am continuing to contribute to this blog some thoughts and ideas arising out of my postgraduate research in international design and HCI. Here is a piece summarising very briefly my exploration of culture-specific personas. I had been working on this concept for some time now but have recently discovered that multivariate testing might be the answer to my questions.

Here’s a summary of my research and what I tried to achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

From a recent seminar presentation by Greig Holbrook (Oban Multilingual):

How to Combine Multilingual SEO/PPC and Cultural Multivariate Testing for Optimum Global Conversions. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wondered what effect your copy has on your website’s visitors? Would a different heading or call to action help you sell more? Do your website users appreciate your sense of humour? Do they tolerate your marketese? Here’s how you can find out! Read the rest of this entry »

As a recent postgraduate in Human-Centred Computer Systems with a keen interest in the multicultural aspects of website design, I have been invited by Malcolm McIlhagga to contribute a piece to his blog which would put multivariate testing in a wider context, that of research techniques used in international design. Here are some of my findings… Read the rest of this entry »

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 »