Conclusions

Let's pretend that you've established your customer market, identified a product they want, and have a good idea of how to provide it to them (perhaps even profitably!) You’ve analyzed your surveys and key metrics, everything seems to make sense. You've done it -- you found an ideal product, with a website to deliver it. Now, let the flow of commerce commence! Ah, but... finding the right business to be in is only the first step on the road. Having found the right business, you still need to run that business and run it well. In the case of a business that relies significantly on traffic to a website, that means making sure the website is doing the best it can in converting visitors – that is, getting them to do what you intended. (As an aside, you’re likely wrong about having found the perfect business, as I’ll explain in a later post.)

This might sound like an obvious question, but let's consider it anyway: “What is a website's job?” Well, at a fundamental level, the website has two tasks:

• To attract visitor traffic; and
  
• To get those visitors to do something desirable -- like spend money, click on ads, upload pictures of lolcats . Whatever your site does.
  

I'm going to talk about the idea of optimizing your website’s content, layout and messaging so that you achieve your business goals as effectively as possible. You may not have considered website optimization in your competitive analysis, but you can bet your next 100,000 page views that your top competitor will be optimizing their website. Fortunately, you can too – website optimization technology has become accessible and affordable, and there are a great many knowledgeable people who can help you implement it.

Now, if you Google "website optimization", you will find almost exclusively articles on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is important too, but it's not what we're talking about here. SEO is about driver optimization -- hopefully it sends more people to your site. But "website optimization", as we're discussing it here, refers to optimizing the user experience to maximize the site’s contribution to your business goals (whatever they are.) Only a few years ago, the techniques that I'm about to mention were not in widespread use. Now, a large percentage of successful companies use them, and those that do have a massive edge over those that don’t.

For the purposes of this article, a website is successful if and only if it furthers your business goals (which can be wide and varied.) We can say that one version of a website is more successful than another if does a better job of furthering business goals – which often means attracting and converting customers. You optimize your site, you run a more successful business. Easy, huh? So here’s Website-Optimization-In-A-Nutshell: On any given page of any website, you (the designer) make thousands of choices of what to present to the viewer (or not to present). Some of these choices will give better results than others, yielding more conversions. To select the best choices, you present different versions of your website to different viewers; then track how successful each version is. If you do this methodically and repeatedly, you will very quickly find that you can improve website performance by 20%-100% or more!

Let’s take a closer look at what this kind of optimizing/testing looks like:

The old guard is A/B testing. This is also known as "split run" testing, or single-variable testing. Under an A/B test, you create two versions of your page, which will be displayed in rotation. One of the two versions is shown to each visitor, often randomly. Based on user response, you establish that one of the pages is more successful. You take the winner, make another version (change something else) and do it again. A/B testing is the aged workhorse of the world of website optimization. It's also arguably obsolete for most applications, although many people still use it. The nice thing about A/B testing is that there are free tools like Google’s Website Optimizer that allow you to jump right into basic optimization. And it’s a heck of a lot better than better than no testing at all.

More advanced is Multiple Variable Testing. Aliases are Multivariable Testing or Multivariate Testing. There are also sub-categories, such as Fractional Multivariate Testing, of which a well-known variant is the “Taguchi Method”. If you're going to play with the big boys, Multiple Variable testing is your big gun. You see, the fundamental problem with A/B testing is that you have to test one variation at a time. Hey, who's got just one variation of their web page? There are millions of possible variations. Can you imagine how long it’ll take to test them all, doing one variation at a time? Uh-uh; if we're going to get results in any reasonable time frame, we're going to have to test multiple variations at ones. Lucky us -- here comes Multiple Variable Testing!

Most commonly, you will actually be using Fractional Multiple Variable Testing. Because there are virtually always too many possible variations of a web page to count, we're going to have to choose a subset of them if we want to get results in time to use them. That's the Fractional part of Fractional Multiple Variable Testing -- we pick a fraction of the possible variations. So just go with your gut -- focus on variations that you feel are likely to give the most bang. Here's what it might look like: you pick out a few basic elements of your web page, choosing the elements that you think are going to be most valuable in attracting and converting customers. For each of these elements, you create several variants. For example if you pick 4 elements with 2 variants each, you have a total of 16 possible web pages. Next, you create a table of the possible variations. Fortunately, experience has told us that you don't need to test all 16 variants; 8 may be sufficient. Don’t worry, about which 8 – the experts have figured it all out for you. Now when a customer lands on your site, they will see one of 8 test pages (rather than just two test pages under A/B testing). This way, you can build up performance data much more quickly, and you can identify successful variations much faster.

By running these tests methodically, systematically and thoroughly you will succeed in honing your website to a razor-sharp edge. One that will translate directly to a business that performs better, however you measure that.

Of course it's much more complicated than this. There are some very sophisticated systems out there that will automatically generate hundreds of variants of your web pages, gather in-depth metrics, and run complex analysis. There are companies that do nothing but this kind of optimization. And in addition to just varying your pages, you have to evaluate dozens of interrelated factors. Some important ones to consider are:

• How long do you test before making a decision? (And should you ever really stop testing?)
  
• You must evaluate the combination of the driver ad (that's sending visitors to your site) and the message on the landing page. This combination is just as important as optimizing each individually.
  
• What are your Short-Term vs. Long-Term goals? Often products that give you good short-term results will give you poorer cumulative results over time.
  
• How do your website and the user experience fit in with your other advertising and business image?
  

By now, you've gathered that website optimization is a complicated process. But you don't have to throw up your hands in despair -- the methods exist to do this systematically; and you can hire the experts to do it. No, you have to hire the experts to do it. It's how the business is run.

Labels: a/b testing, multiple variable testing, seo, taguchi method, testing, website optimization