experience matters

Image compliments of www.seekyledraw.com.

Alex Clemmons | Critical Mass Chicago

It often takes months to develop a website or digital program.  After tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, persona development, creative reviews, usability testing and some long nights, launch date is a huge milestone.  But often times after a site goes live the client is ready to move on to the next project.  However, it is in the post launch period that we can actually have the most impact and ensure that all the time and money we spent is paying off.  Website optimization, the process of making continual improvements to the site in order to increase performance, can help make our clients, and ourselves, look like rock stars.

Part of website optimization comes from reporting.  Every marketing initiative should have goals, and it is the Marketing Science Department’s job to define and track progress against these goals.  Through reporting, we can identify underperforming areas and make recommendations for improvement.  When we combine reporting with testing we can start to understand not only what is working, but why it is working as well.

Almost every aspect of a digital program can come under debate; page layouts, calls to action, image size and page colors are just a few things that can be contested.

A testing program could help settle these debates and optimize the experience to meet our marketing objectives and more importantly our customer’s goals.

In a nut shell, testing is the process by which we test different versions of a web page on the live site environment and then, through scientific methods, declare a winner of the test (the page that has best shown the ability to best convert visitors to do the actions that we want them to do).

The simplest form of testing is an A/B test.  We pick a site goal, like conversion from a landing page, and then measure how different versions of this page perform against our goal.  With tools like Omniture’s Test & Target or Google’s Website Optimizer we can serve up pages that have different images, copy or other treatments in real time and measure the results against a control page.

Page A is our control; it has not had any changes made to it.  On page B, we can start to swap things out; it could be a new image or a different call to action.  We run our test and find that visitors who saw page B had a 300% higher conversion rate than those who saw page A!

A more complex test we can run is a multivariate test, which allows us to change multiple components of the page at the same time.  Doing so can help us find a combination of images, copy, offers or anything else we can dream up that work the best.

Optimization programs can lead to some very powerful insights and recommendations.  But there are a few things that need happen for an optimization program to be successful:

1. Commitment to the program.  This one seems pretty obvious, but if the client is not committed we are destined to fail.  This commitment includes the creation of extra comps/copy/offers/etc. for us to test.  It also may include timing and process changes as well.
2. We have to invest in the right tools and process.  Some tools are free, others are not.  With any Marketing Science program, we need to evaluate our needs and implement the right tool for the job.  We also have to secure some time from our developers, so they can add a code snippet to allow for testing on the page.  Finally, we have to ensure that we are staffed to analyze these results on both the client and the agency side.
3. Socialization of our results.    Testing can lead to some very powerful insights that can help inform the work of every team that touches the site.  But it is all in vain if we do not share what we have learned both internally and externally.

So where do we start?  You have to be able to walk before you can run so start by running some simple A/B tests on your top landing pages – this is most likely where you will see some immediate results.  As you begin to get the hang of things, you can start to experiment with the more complex multivariate tests and before you know it you will have pretty serious optimization program in place.

The fact that most concepts include many creative options means we may already have material to test, so why guess which will work the best when we can prove it through testing?  Given the opportunities that the digital space offers, it is important that we understand what works and what does not.  It is also important that we plan for change, and understand that the launch of the site is just the beginning of the optimization process.  Tight budgets and short timelines mean that we are forced to do more with less; optimization can help ensure that we get the most bang for our buck and achieve rock star status.  Let’s rock and roll!

Alex is a Marketing Science Analyst out of Chicago.