Search Marketing Blog
Multivariate Testing – More Than Just Two Sides
Posted by Kent Schnepp on 07.07.2008
Let’s face it (!), by now most savvy marketers know that Paid Search Marketing delivers a compelling value proposition that cannot be achieved through most traditional media channels such as print, television, and outdoor. Paid Search Marketing is able to definitively measure the return on each advertising dollar.
However, in order to maximize the return on your Paid Search budget, it is paramount that you take your campaign beyond just bid management, position analysis, and ad copy testing. In today’s hyper-competitive online environment, you need to systematically perform rigorous testing to determine which elements of your campaign are enticing PPC visitors to convert into customers.
Beyond A/B Testing
Aggressively testing and optimizing your landing pages and other campaign elements provide a benefit beyond improving your conversion rates. You can also dramatically out-perform your competition’s efforts in the search engines. JupiterResearch reports that more than sixty percent (60%) of all Paid Search campaigns do not include any type of comparison testing.
An effective means of accomplishing this evaluation has been to employ regularly scheduled A/B testing on Paid Search landing pages, in order to identify the better performing version of the same PPC landing page. Now, however, it is possible to take this analysis to an even higher level through multivariate testing, which actually evaluates the performance of specific elements of each Paid Search landing page within your PPC campaign.
The concept of multivariate testing is very simple. However, the approach to granularly testing each unique page elements is very advanced. Most PPC campaigns deliver online visitors to a specific landing page. Since the design, layout, and messaging of these arrival pages ultimately determine their success, the ability to test specific page elements (not just separate versions of the same landing page) significantly improves your opportunity for conversions.
Multivariate Means More
The definition of ‘multivariate’ is ‘having or involving more than one variable’. Multivariate testing enables you to identify which changes made to your campaign elements have the greatest impact upon conversion rates and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).
Through the application of multivariate testing to your content, images, calls-to-action, and specific offers, you can ascertain which site presentation will lead to your highest conversion rate. In addition, multivariate testing can be applied to your other important Web site components, including online forms, sales funnels, navigation structure, and micro-sites.
These techniques simultaneously test and optimize multiple elements (e.g., images, prices, headlines, value propositions, etc.) to determine how each factor impacts your performance. By using sophisticated analytics, and statistical confidence levels, multivariate testing consistently presents the most enticing page elements to your prospective customers.
Active Testing
The process to multivariate testing of landing page elements within your Paid Search campaign should include the following simplified steps:
- Design/create/identify specific page element to evaluate, (e.g., call-to-action message, action button, check-out flow, etc.)
- Establish multivariate test success metric, (e.g., click-through-rate, conversion rate, ROAS, etc.)
- Establish confidence level of success metric, (e.g., 95% confident that one element performed better than the other)
- Determine test length, (be sure to take into account seasonality factors, sales cycles, etc.)
- Define test size, (i.e., establish how many visits is appropriate for your confidence level)
- Monitor performance, (record the success metric results each day of the test)
- Determine performance test results, (assign success variable to each landing page)
- Apply multivariate process to new landing page elements, (i.e., test additional features on page)
Ultimately, this process should identify which elements contained on your Paid Search landing pages entice a greater number of site visitors to perform a desired result (e.g., fill-out a form, request information, make a purchase, etc.).
