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Before you start formulating a test hypothesis, or begin running tests, the first and most important step is to ensure that there are defined objectives for the website. You’ll want to examine your marketing goals in order to determine the appropriate success factors that all of your organization’s stakeholders can agree upon. Here are some typical measurable website goals:
1) Make money: sell product, generate leads, and advertising or promotional click-throughs.
2) Save money: enable users to adopt self-service features and/or answer product and service questions on their own (such as through online FAQs and documentation).
3) Create brand awareness and industry visibility.
It’s important for all stakeholders to agree on the goal(s) of the website, because when a decision is made to adjust or optimize something on the site, everyone's needs should be addressed. Make sure you are testing the things that truly matter for your organization and balancing performance across all stakeholders.
Once goals are determined, the next step is sifting through potential key performance indicators (KPIs) to decide upon those that will accurately measure progress towards specific marketing goals and benchmarks. For example:
- If the goal is to make money, track those pages and areas of the site that users click on in the conversion funnel, such as the “Buy Now”button and resulting “Thank You”pages.
- If the goal is to save money, track the interactions with both the self-service areas (like FAQs and help content) as well as non-self-service areas (such as contact and help ticket generation) of the site.
- Brand awareness goals can be more difficult to track, but certain KPIs can be proxies for customer loyalty, such as recency and frequency of visits and time spent on site, and the percentage of return visitors. Other behaviors to track could include “send to a friend” or “print page” features that indicate a visitor’s interest in sharing your site with others.
Beware of scenarios where an increase in one desirable KPI can cause a decrease in another (perhaps more valuable) KPI. This cannibalization can sometimes be a Catch-22, so the best practice is simply to track both KPIs to provide increased visibility of user behavior.
Once you’ve agreed upon your website goals and KPIs, now is the time to determine the goals of your multivariate testing strategy. These are often related to your website goals but can be much more granular. Let’s look at a typical retail/ecommerce website as an example. The owners of this site will obviously want their site to make money; here are some of the things they could test and measure in support of that goal:
- Account or newsletter registration:Which navigation path successfully led to the most completions of a new account registration, newsletter signup, or other lead generation form?
- E-commerce:What elements of the website led to the most “Add to Cart” clicks, followed by successful order completion pages (e.g. “Thank you for your order”)?Which combination of product information such as graphics, descriptions, layout, and color increased average order value?
- Promotions/offers: Did the visitor click on a promotion, and then did they take the additional step(s) necessary to complete the conversion process? Bear in mind that it is not enough to simply track clicks from the promotion; if you do this, you risk optimizing for what is most persuasive in getting users to “click” one step further, but not necessary all the way to the conversion. What you need to do is measure both clicks and conversions, and in doing so you will determine the best way to get people to convert. You may end up with fewer people clicking on the promotion, but a higher percentage of them will convert, leading to a higher absolute number of conversions.
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