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As our clients and readers of this blog will know by now, multivariate testing offers a proven way to discover the most effective content online and generate more revenue through websites. There are always easy wins to be had through testing, however, there is also longer term sustained uplift to be gained through careful campaign design and planning.

Achieving sustained uplift should be considered the ultimate prize in any optimisation campaign. A 5% uplift in conversion rate which impacts the bottom line for the long term could deliver significantly more value than 30% uplift on the response to an element of seasonal content.

In our experience uplift resulting from multivariate testing generally falls into one of three categories:

Temporal Uplift - where winning content includes promotions or time-sensitive elements. Examples include limited special offers where the value of uplift is realised during the period of the offer.

Extrapolated Uplift - where form, structure and information architecture in one area of a site are tested and the winning content elements can be applied across all pages employing the same template. In this case, a small percentage in uplift can have a dramatic effect on overall business performance

Sustained Uplift - where ongoing benefit is produced by implementing winning content. Tests which include structural improvements to high traffic pages and multi-stage processes such as check-outs typically provide sustained uplift.

When deploying multivariate testing, as much consideration should be put into the expertise in campaign design that you are able to leverage from the provider as is put into the selection of the tool itself. Temporal uplift can return some jaw-dropping numbers in a short time period but it is the Extrapolated and Sustained uplift that will provide the long term impact on your site performance.

Mark Simpson

UK online advertising spend reached £2.8bn last year according to the IAB Adspend Survey 2007. However, the majority of brands are missing out on over half of convertible traffic simply due to ineffective web content.

In order to achieve sustained growth, brands must match increases in advertising spend with improvements in the effectiveness of on-site content. By investing a fraction of acquisition budgets on solutions to increase the conversion rate of a site, it becomes easier to gain ROI from all traffic sources.

A highly converting site doesn't only deliver more bottom line revenue in month one. Armed with an industry leading cost per acquisition, a marketer can play harder at the acquisition game, confident that they can outspend the competition whilst generating positive returns.

By testing live visitor response to different content variations on websites, it is possible to identify the content that best drives visitors towards any goal in a measurable and scientific way. As the cost of acquiring high quality traffic increases, the justification grows for investing in the optimisation of site content.

If the entirety of the UK ad spend was converted, the cost benefits for the market would run into billions. Our Automated Content Optimisation removes wastage by discovering the best performing content on your site and showing it to more visitors.

Talk to us today about how we can help you cut the waste!

Call +44 (0)844 412 8800 or Book a Demo

Peter Ellen, MD, Maxymiser looks at post analytics optimisation and multichannel merchandising as a major source of new sales in our latest white paper. As online retail matures, it will face the operational challenges of a maturing discipline.

“Brands that fail to embrace content optimisation will deliver weak user experiences, loosing sales and loyalty to those with optimised online stores.”

Maxymiser’s Onsite Content Optimisation solutions enable retailers to progressively optimise user experience in a realtime live environment. This doesn’t require any focus groups or labs so you can get down to brass tacks much quicker. It does put your analytics data to excellent use by addressing the issues that analytics diagnose.

Download the Free Whitepaper "Optimising E-Tail For All Sorts" to learn about how content optimisation will drive better performance for your online presence.

As former Jupiter analyst Eric T. Peterson puts it, “If you're not testing, you're not really taking proper advantage of the data your analytics provides.”