Billy's Blog: Multivariate Testing & Optimization

I will be at ad:tech New York on November 3-4 manning the Widemile Booth #922.  If you have any questions on optimization, landing pages or anything else, stop by and we can chat.

Also, I will be giving some mini-clinics on optimization best practices, how creative influences optimization and perhaps a case study or two based around those topics.  The last half of those clinics, I’d like to take a look at some live pages and review them.

But to be more effective, I’d like those live pages to be from volunteers.  If you have a page you’d like me to look at, send me a URL and a good time for you and I’ll try to make sure you get included in a clinic around that time.

Find me at ad:tech booth #922

If you catch me when I’m free, I also can take a look at your page and give you some of my thoughts on how to improve and test it.  Send me your URL’s beforehand for best results though.

Hope to see some of you there!

I was on vacation and have been swamped in catching up with client work, but I promise I’ll finish my article on fractional factorial test design soon! It’s a very long article and I want to make sure I get it right.

Hope some of you got to see the Widemile booth at SMX Advanced in Seattle (I didn’t since I was on vacation unfortunately.) I heard good things about the panel Widemile’s CEO, Robert Bergquist, was on and that Jonathan Mendez was kind enough to recommend my blog as a resource, so thanks goes out to him.

Thanks for sticking with me!

I try to keep this blog strictly about testing, but I have to make an exception. One of the biggest reasons I am working at Widemile is because I believe it has a great future ahead of it and our announcement today is part of that future.

There are two exciting parts to the announcement: the first is that we are revealing our new optimization platform, which has been designed with agencies in mind, and second, we have 13 partners lined up to begin using our new optimization platform. That list is comprised of these amazing companies: Ascentium, Avenue A | Razorfish, Brand Digital, Closed Loop Marketing, DDB in Seattle, Palazzo Intercreative, POP, Portent Interactive, Red Bricks Media, SolutionSet, Stratigent, TMP Directional Marketing, and ZeroDash1.

In celebration of this announcement, I have moved the blog to this domain, testingblog.widemile.com and redesigned the page to look more like our new website at www.widemile.com.

This is the start of a new era for Widemile and as my company matures, I plan to continue to blog and become an even more valuable resource to the online marketing and campaign optimization community.

Press release @ Widemile.com. 

Official press release in PDF format.

I try to keep this blog non-company specific but my boss Frans Keylard, Director of Optimization, helped write up an informative case study of a client he worked on, Smartsheet.com. The case study is 4 pages long, covering the process and analysis of a multivariate test we did on one of Smartsheet.com’s landing pages. You can download it from Widemile.com, it requires a name and an e-mail to get it (sorry!)

Here’s my favorite image from the whole thing…

Being a newcomer to the small but growing online testing industry has put me in a unique position. Not only do I get to learn about completely fresh and exciting marketing technology, but also I have an opportunity to build upon this nascent industry. While I have only just started, already I am way ahead of most online marketers in terms of understanding online content optimization.

Recently, A/B, split and multivariate testing have become hot topics in online marketing, yet they are still far from commonplace. With that comes a lack of resources or even knowledge about testing, although the demand to know more is quickly rising. As I have found out, and hope to share with this blog, there is a lot more to testing than just trying new things out. Much like the many businesses that have been burned by bad PPC campaigns, there are businesses that have had bad experiences testing. However, I know for a fact that good testing methodology and technology drives results. I hope that I can help other marketers out there learn more about optimization and develop a culture of testing and optimization in their companies.

Don’t just change it, test it.