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Earlier this week we announced we’d entered into nine new partnerships with a range of companies providing complementary web marketing technologies and services.

Our partners can leverage our content optimisation technology to add value to and cement existing client relationships. Maxymiser can take the data and expertise that these organisations already do business with and use it to deliver quantifiable uplifts in conversion rates for clients.

The key driver for these partnerships is that client demand for onsite optimisation is growing as the cost of acquiring high quality traffic increases. This gives marketers greater reason to focus on getting more revenue from existing traffic. Gone are the days when acquisition efforts could be scaled up with simple budget increases; beyond a certain point, traffic quality becomes an issue and conversion rate suffers.

Maxymiser uses artificial intelligence to quickly deduce the campaigns that are having the best impact on response rates online. By monitoring live visitor response to web content, our technology serves the right campaign combinations to the right people at the right time in order to boost sales. Techniques including multivariate testing, visitor segmentation and behavioural targeting are supported in Maxymiser’s optimisation suite.

By trialling solutions to bottlenecks identified in analytics or assessing the impact that usability-led changes have on metrics, we close the loop on many other disciplines, making their expertise actionable and highlighting the value added to the bottom line.

Visitor segmentation creates additional synergies with our partners. We can optimise to find the optimal content for groups of visitors already defined in an analytics tool, by keyword group as inputted by a PPC agency or by traffic source from an advertising network.

Our partners in areas of online marketing as diverse as web analytics, search marketing and usability can now help their clients address this challenge. Take a look around our partner section to learn more when you have a spare moment.

Peter Ellen

MD (Services)

Mark Simpson is currently on Holiday somewhere sunnier than the UK

Peter Ellen will be on the panel at tonight's IAB debate in London. He'll be fighting the corner for "Online Hasn't Killed the Pleasure of Shopping". Peter's our MD (services) at Maxymiser and will call on both his extensive high street retail management experience and his time heping retailers form online strategy to make some compelling arguements.

If you're in town, why not call in and see some of the industry's leading lights battle it out under the guise of a debate!

The event will be taking place at the Rex Cinema & Bar, 21 Rupert Street, Soho, W1V 7FE. It begins at 18.30 tonight, 22nd November.

In the youthful days of the internet, marketers were preoccupied with building online real-estate. Getting the right domain, acquiring traffic and ranking high in search engines were the key priorities. The rise in online advertising spend is well documented demonstration of this phase; we’ve all seen the graphs with their exponential upward curves.

Once marketers got good at acquisition, the brightest ones began to reach the limit of the amount of high quality traffic they could bring to a site in a cost-effective manner. At this point, the focus shifted to analysing what these visitors were doing once they arrived at the site. Marketers wrestled the controls of web analytics tools away from the IT department and began to analyse funnels and abandon rates.

Now we reach the present, our top of the class online marketer has taken steps to resolve the big issues that analytics highlighted and is looking for the next way to keep ahead of his (or her) competition.

In the UK and European market, a growing number of forward-thinking companies are harnessing content intelligence to drive the next stage in on-site conversion uplift. Techniques such as multivariate testing, visitor segmentation and behavioural targeting allow marketers to place the right content, creative and offers in front of the right visitors at the right time.

Multivariate testing combines well worn direct marketing techniques with some intelligent mathematics and automated methods of changing site content on the fly. What’s more, with self learning techniques, Maxymiser technology can learn what content drives uplift and display it to more future visitors.

Visitor segmentation and behavioural targeting represent the upper echelons of content intelligence. By discovering what content works well for visitors segmented by various criteria, a site can take account of the fact that not everyone is turned on by the same things.

Behavioural targeting takes this a stage further and discovers the content that works best on a highly granular visitor by visitor basis. We can even pull in data from client CRM databases in order to get demographic profiling by postal/zip code as well as looking at past interaction history.

Peter sets out his full vision of Content Intelligence in our whitepaper on the subject, you can download that here – Introducing Automated Content Intelligence.

NMA’s feature “Another Way”, published last week explores the role of sub-optimal journeys in online stores and the guys were kind enough to include a quote from me concerning the fact that around 60% of offline purchases satisfy “latent demand”, products that catch the eye of the shopper as they browse the shop.

The idea of serendipity, finding one product whilst looking for another is great and Maxymiser cross sell optimisation can help marketers to exploit this in the real world. We would suggest that these additional basket items shouldn’t be considered random, there must be a process to guide customers (without them sensing it) towards likely cross sell and up sell items to really take advantage of this.

Just because demand is latent doesn’t mean you can use random activity to get people to respond. If that was the case Tesco would use dumper trucks to deliver their goods to stores and tip them in through the open doors so customers could have a good rummage. Shoppers would belay themselves up to the tomatoes and their trolleys would be 4 wheel drive to cope with the terrain.

Capitalising on latent demand is about creating linkages between products and services in a way that customers like and find interesting. Linkages occur in product attributes, patterns of consumption and market dynamics. Customers find them so interesting that they decide they want some of something they had no initial intention of buying. The resulting increase in demand for a product can be 100’s of %.

An example is where a product is subject to a price change or something happens to bring it out of obscurity and into vogue. A flight to city X might appeal to user Y when price Z is offered and it’s reviewed in the Observer on Sunday, which user Y reads with his croissants every week. Prior to this user Y thought city X was type of vodka and they are amused to find out it isn’t. So Mrs Y says what they hell, we need a break - lets go!

Peter Ellen
MD (services)

Our technology has included the capability to segment traffic to a site based on "web environment data", that's criteria such as browser type, operating system and screen resolution since launch. It's relatively easy to do because, believe it or not, your browser supplies this information to every web server it connects to unless you have customised your privacy settings. You might be wondering why this is of any importance. When combined, these three criteria allow you to determine what type of device is being used to view a website. That means we have the capability to optimise your site separately for visitors using different devices. A consumer browsing from their Nokia smartphone while on the move will respond positively to different content than a teenager at home browsing from a games console.

We can, in many cases, even distinguish between devices and serve customised content. For example, the optimal page to persuade an Apple iPhone user to convert to a sale could be subtly different to that which persuades a Nokia N95 to convert. There are also significant usability elements. If your website can detect that a visitor is coming from a small-screen portable device, content can be served differently to speed up browsing and allow the visitor to get more from your site in a shorter time frame.

This is all juicy stuff but it is a common sense progression of multivariate testing. With visitor segmentation, we are performing a series of multivariate tests in order to optimise content for each target group of visitors. It is not, as a competitor termed it earlier this week a "quantum leap" in site testing and optimisation although it can add significant uplift in conversions.

If we were wheeling out our marketing hype writing skills, Behavioural Targeting would be the natural "quantum leap" candidate. With this technology, websites and offers can be personalised to a visitor by visitor level. Our behavioural targeting is capable of doing that today, we can input client CRM data about past interactions and other demographic information and serve the optimal content to ensure that the possibility of each individual visitor converting is maximised. Segmentation by device is a powerful tool but it's by no means the state of the art in website optimisation; behavioural targeting is and surprisingly, that competitor can't offer that technology yet.

Today, I'd like you to consider this simple question:

Why aren't you performing multivariate testing yet?*

We have a convincing case study-led business case for our work and all of our current clients are seeing commercial benefits that are far in excess of their outlay. It's a no-brainer. When used with our market-leading Continuous Optimisation technology, multivariate testing can only increase your online metrics. That means more conversions, enquiries or applications, whatever the metric is that your boss breathes down your neck to increase, we can help you to achieve that.

We have a big household name financial institution about to announce in the UK shortly and they, along with our existing clients, are going to see their online performance boosted for very little outlay either in terms of expenditure or labour.

Our optimisation will increase the conversions (sales, enquiries, applications etc) of your website from your existing traffic. We know that good quality traffic from Google PPC and CPM deals is becoming ever more expensive to source so our technology is a natural next stage. By learning what content turns your browsers into buyers, you can ensure that you are making the most of the traffic that is driven to your site by existing marketing budgets.

For many of our clients, the optimisation has delivered a conversion rate increase in excess of 100%, putting more money in the pot for other marketing activity, be that PPC, CPM or email.

If you want to increase conversions on your site then get in touch with us to learn more.

* we've yet to hear a good reason not to test and optimise content on a goal-driven consumer website. if you have one, post it here and we'll address it directly.

As good quality traffic from sources such as PPC, CPM and SEO campaigns becomes more costly and harder to come by, Internet marketers have become used to using Web Analytics to increase the conversion rate of traffic once it has arrived at their site. You can spend as much as you like driving traffic to a site but if it only converts 1.5% of visitors to a useful action (eg the sale) then the best way of generating uplift is to focus on user interactions with the site.

As one of the first european evangelists of website optimisation through live testing with techniques such as A/B, split and multivariate testing, I'm frequently asked how this adds value to a company that already has web analytics. The answer is quite straightforward and described in this document that we recently put together. I'll paraphrase here but the document has the full details.

The primary purpose of web analytics is monitoring the behaviour of website visitors. Through monitoring and analysis of user activity, site analytics can provide sophisticated reports on conversion rates of visitors from different sources towards the site’s key goals (KPIs).

Analytics reports can highlight issues with the site (for example, high abandonment on one page in a funnel process) but doesn’t directly offer the means to address it.


With a traditional approach, if the content changes made to resolve the issue highlighted don’t work, a downturn in KPIs will be experienced during the testing period.

Maxymiser’s website optimisation solutions take the guesswork out of making content changes. This is achieved by creating multiple variations; testing these in a live environment to website visitors and optimising the site towards the best performing content. The technology is constantly monitoring the live response of visitors to the content and optimising the site in real time. This gives a significant uplift in KPIs.


Optimisation of a site with web analytics and Maxymiser live testing is a process of continual improvement addressing issues one by one with the highest priority attached to those issues with the largest potential for KPI uplift. With continuous optimisation technology, pages can be left unattended to self-optimise towards a defined goal with no need for human interaction.


By integrating web analytics and Maxymiser optimisation, web site owners can take action to resolve issues presented and maximise KPIs on an ongoing basis. By utilising live testing of content, click waste and the risk of KPI downturn is removed.

Read the full document - The Benefits of Using Maxymiser Optimisation with Web Analytics (250KB, PDF)

In previous entries we've covered the area of multivariate and split testing for website optimisation so I thought I would share a little about one of Maxymiser's more successful ways to increase revenue through a transactional site.

Our multivariate testing technology can be easily integrated with a product database or in order to identify and promote cross-selling opportunities. Wikipedia's definition explains cross-selling in a nice succinct way so we won't cover that here but basically on the web it's all about using your site to persuade people to buy extra items in order to increase revenues, something retailers are masters at offline at point of sale.

Amazon use very effective cross-selling optimisation and if you haven't visited their site in the last 12 months or so, it's well worth a look. However, you don't need to have a product range as vast as theirs in order to benefit from cross-selling. Banks, IT suppliers (esp. Dell) and grocery retailers are particularly adept at cross-selling.

Maxymiser optimises a cross-selling system by offering extra products or services to your customers at the opportune moment in the shopping process. Our self-learning technology monitors which products sell well, when and where together during the initial exploration phase and then exploits this by showing the combinations of product that are most likely to generate your a cross-sale and drive up your revenue.

The two main pitfalls to cross selling are easily avoided by conducing live testing because self-learning algorithms optimise your offering in real-time and will show preference to combinations that generate uplift over those that do not. Here are those pitfalls so that you can avoid them:

- Irrelevance can upset -> a friend of the company purchased a book online entitled "Bumblebees of the British Isles". Upon visiting the site again later that week, he was offered a range of books about homosexuality, presumably the CRM system had picked up the word 'bum'.

- Don't push what customers were going to take anyway -> if you have a visitor who buys bread and milk every day, cross-selling isn't effective if all it does is suggest that the visitor buys milk once they have added bread to their basket. When you implement cross-selling, ensure you are promoting something new and relevant not what the visitor was going to purchase anyway.

A/B and split testing are great methods for working out which of two variations on some content will generate the greater sales, registrations or some other key metric. Anyone who has optimised a Google Adwords campaign to any level will be familiar with the concept – you serve two content options to your visitors and find out which one attracts the right leads or makes people most likely to buy.

Maxymiser offers the ability to perform A/B testing on web page content; it’s the entry level to our technology. However, to really learn what the optimal content is for your site, you need to be testing more than one area of the homepage.

Imagine we wanted to optimise enquiries from the Maxymiser website. We could perform a test to assess the impact that 4 different banner images have on quote requests and also the affect of replacing the ‘Segmentation’ text with a diagram. This gives us an A/B/C/D test and an A/B test as shown in the illustration.



Running these two tests at the same time using a feature available in some CMS solutions would give invalid results. This is because we would be measuring the response based only on one of the variables. People who saw Banner A might convert better than those who saw Banner B but without data on which variant of the A/B test lower down the page that they saw, any conclusions aren’t valid. People don’t make decisions based just on one variable, both will contribute so testing multiple areas in this way is flawed.

You could run the tests one after another but again, you could miss an uplift generated by a particular combination of content. For example, you may test the 4 banner variants first and find out that C gives the greatest uplift at 34%. The next month this is implemented and the lower area is now tested with variant B winning with 15% uplift. This approach doesn’t tell you how people would have responded to variant B with the other three banner variations. This is a critical flaw, in our experience it is never the winners of each individual areas that combine together to give the best overall page, therefore the winners of each individual area do not give the greatest conversion uplift.

Another option would be to combine the two tests into one. This gives an A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H test (2 x 4 variants). Adopting this approach does give results that reflect all of the possible combinations a visitor could see but it is time consuming and complex to code if you are not using a tool that can simply alter front end content without re-writing pages.

A more effective option is to make this a Multivariate test using simple technology to implement. This will minimise the technical resource needed for setup and deliver reports on which combination of content as well as which individual element provides the best uplift in quote requests. By working with a company such as Maxymiser, you don’t need to worry about sample sizes, tracking response and test setup as our technology handles this and give you clear reports at the end of the process so that you can report uplift within your organisation and apply the results.

With Continuous Optimisation, you can even allow our tools to monitor the test 24/7 and once it becomes clear that one variant is outperforming all others, it will be shown with greater frequency. This way, the site optimises itself without any human intervention, limiting the downside of testing, pushing more visitors to optimal variants as they emerge. On a technical front, Maxymiser requires very little technical resource to implement, your webpage simply needs some java script tags inserting that allow our server to insert content into the defined ‘Maxybox’ test areas and track visitor response. It really doesn’t take much more than half an hour of a techie’s time!

We will be performing some live multivariate testing on our own homepage later in the year to give a demonstration of how our technology works, in the mean time take a look at one of our many clients while we test them. Stay tuned for more.

Maxymiser's focus is optimising your website. The unique aspect to our approach is that we don't have a 'little black book' of magical tricks or any other way to preach to you about what will work best on your site. We can certainly make creative suggestions but the crux is that your users decide what content is going to make them most likely to buy your goods or services!

Inside the building we like the analogy that our optimization is akin to a TV talent show like Fame Academy[1]. Our clients take some time designing different messaging, photos and forms for their pages and then we serve the 'contestants' out in equal proportions to web visitors.

As web visitors arrive at the site, we monitor their behaviour. The content that makes them click to buy (or register or any other key metric) gains a 'vote' every time a visitor does this. After we've collected in a statistically valid number of votes, we make sure only the best contestants are displayed in future 'episodes'. Eventually a winner is shown to your visitors; this being the contestant that has the highest chance of turning browsers into buyers.

So let us work with you to find the web content that is going to be your star performer and get your conversions up!

[1] you can also look at it the other way around if you're the "glass half empty" type and say it's like big brother - the content that doesn't get votes gets evicted and isn't shown to future visitors because it was no good at converting them to buyers and making you money.

A client we met with earlier this year came to us because his marketing guy had just run the stats reports for a new website analytics package their hosting company had installed. It revealed that 70% of visitors arriving at their homepage were leaving the site within 30 seconds, never visiting another page.

This was bad news for the company; 60% of the traffic to their page was coming from Pay Per Click sources so he may as well have been putting 70% of his budget down the drain as those users weren't interacting with his site at all.

The truly worrying thing is that a 70% 'abandon rate' isn't actually that rare. Check out your stats and if you can't view the number of visitors who never click further than the homepage then come and talk to us as our testing can measure this metric as part of the process.

For this particular client, we worked with them to create new variations on their homepage designs ready for multivariate testing. In designing the variations we followed these 3 rules:

1. Make the variations of the homepage to be tested very relevant to what you're advertising. If your PPC campaigns advertise Widgets, make sure you can read about or buy Widgets on the frontpage. Without that, your potential buyers will just hit the back button and go to a competitor.

2. Make each content variant distinct. The bigger the difference in variants for multivariate testing the more likely a difference in conversion rates will be seen and the greater the difference in conversions will be. Using this approach clients also learn a lot more about what affects customers decisions and what keep their attention. Finer testing can take place after these initial learning to refine variants and further increase conversions.

3. Make one of your content variations very "text light". Your company has a lot to shout about but by covering the homepage with text you're likely to confuse visitors and they'll leave because they can't see what they want straight away.

By working closely with the client in setting up their test and during the initial phase, we were able to decrease their abandonment rate four fold and have subsequently delivered an increase in their conversion rate of 63%. That's 63% more revenue through the web compared to what they got just three months ago.

The client is presently undergoing more tests on landing pages, segmenting traffic dependant on referrer (google adword, different banner ads, etc) and optimising accordingly, taking them from one landing page to multiple optimised pages in one easy step. Next stage will be to look at product and checkout pages.

It just goes to show that there's a lot of extra revenue to be generated just by using the traffic you already have more cleverly. Our client could still be incrementally increasing his PPC budgets to bring more traffic but for a similar amount of investment, he now has Maxymiser continuous optimisation making the most of current traffic lowering CPA and providing more money for traffic driving activities.

Please post your comments below, what have you found can help to reduce abandon rates?

Today we're pleased to announce that we've signed up three major new clients, P&O Ferries, National Express Coaches and CheapFlights.co.uk. All of them are keen to see what works best for conversions on their front pages. We're looking forward to working with these new clients to deliver increased conversion rates.

For readers outside of the UK, National Express are our main inter-city coach operator over here, a bit like Greyhound in the States and Austrailia. P&O ferries are one of our main ferry companies whilst CheapFlights.co.uk are a leading flight price comparison site. All of these three have a target of increasing conversions (ticket sales for two and quality clickthroughs to partners for CheapFlights) but as we covered in our last entry, Maxymiser can also be used to optimise other actions such as registrations or even the time spent reading a site. I've hyperlinked each so you can find out more about the kinds of companies we're working with.

Maxymiser isn't restricted to big companies, we have a number of smaller clients too so whatever your web business is, get in touch with us.

We're preparing a press release now with full details so I'll post that as soon as it's available. In the meantime, I'd just like to say that I'm very pleased that we're attracting this quality of client as it really goes to show that what we talk about here is being picked up and recognised by the internet marketing community.

Oh, and the guys over at Wikipedia have posted a definition of Multivariate testing now so you don't just have to take our word for it.

This is taken from our monthly newsletter, scroll down for 5 reasons why you should be carrying out Multivariate testing!

Optimisation of your website is a frequently overlooked subject, good SEO and PPC bring the visitors while Content Optimisation, often forgotten, makes sure they convert (buy, book, register, click through, etc) and bring you revenue from your website.

Conversion rate is just the technical term for the percentage of website visitors that complete your set goals. If it's an e-commerce site selling widgets, the conversion rate is the number of people successfully buying a widget as a percentage of the total number of visitors, it's that simple! Here's a diagram too:

1. Know What Works (& What Doesn’t) – Never worry about whether particular site content helps people convert or not. Test it and see. If something doesn’t help, remove it, if it helps then do more of it.

2. Increase Conversions Without Increasing Spend – Your existing PPC and banner campaigns might be well tested and giving you good click rates. However, this traffic is wasted if 70% of people abandon your site at the homepage. Multivariate testing keeps people on your site longer and increases the chance they will convert.

3. Customer Loyalty – Categorise your customers and find who responds best to different creative designs. With segmented multivariate testing it is easy to serve different content to different customers. Your 65+ visitors will react to different content to your 18-25s.

4. Stop Guessing – Ask anyone who is involved in running your website (marketing, design, development, management) how to improve it and you will uncover a list of hundreds of ideas, all different. Through using content optimisation it is easy to test all of this with no long implementation timelines and statistically prove what works best for your conversion rates and what doesn’t. You no longer have to test ideas one after the other in a long A/B testing cycle – get results in days, test multiple areas, then move on with increased revenue.

5. Maintain Your Competitive Edge – In a competitive marketplace, it is suicide to stand still. As competitors and new entrants develop and push to lower CPA, the easiest way to beat them is through increasing your conversion rate, giving more money to spend on traffic driving activities and significantly increasing ROI. Through content optimisation we have never found a site we have not increased the conversion of, increases up to 200% and beyond are within your grasp.

Multivariate testing is a frightening sounding term but in reality, it’s quite simple. What it does is take all the guesswork and old wives’ tales out of creative decisions for websites. We’ve all been there; the web designer says the "add to basket" button should be on the top right, marketing reckon bottom right and the MD gets involved wants it on the left!

These arguments can (and should) crop up daily in any online business that’s going places. There’s no way of telling who is right without testing because although bottom right will work for some sites, top right might work for others. Try asking your web guy to set up a head to head test of all three positions and the resulting workload is likely to make him just give in and side with the MD’s suggestion. Even if you do go ahead and set up a three way test, there’s a big technical labour overhead with setting that up to display each location of “add to basket” button to display to 33% of visitors then you’d have to program a back end to report the stats. A month later you might know the outcome and be able to implement the best performing button across the whole site. In the meantime, you’ll have lost potential sales due to not having the best possible location on show.

Maxymiser takes the stress out of finding the content that gives the most conversions, registrations or other key metric. Your web coder simply needs to implement “Maxyboxes” on the page so that the Maxymiser server can insert the three different content variations being tested. If you have a high traffic site, it will only be a matter of days before cast iron results from our statistically-sound sample will be available ready for you to either implement yourself or to simply click a button to have Maxymiser implement the best performing button location.

That’s the simple view, in reality, most of our clients want to test many combinations of a large number of site elements. Next entry, I’ll take you through how Maxymiser adds value with Continuous Optimisation and how we can help with your design of experiment to produce statistically valid results in a shorter time with Taguchi Orthogonal Arrays.