Design Station Musings

Testing is one of the areas of search engine optimization and internet marketing that is least familiar to many site owners and campaign managers. Yet it is the only effective way to ensure that your viral marketing, website design and other internet marketing efforts are realized for the benefits they create. Additionally, testing helps you know what to keep spending your time on, and what to dump in order to maximize results and minimize spending. You may realize the need for testing - today we are looking at some of the most useful tips on testing your internet marketing efforts.

1. Utilize multivariate testing strategies
One of the frustrations of testing is the time it takes, and the sample sizes that are necessary. The gold standard in months gone by was A/B split testing, where internet marketing teams would change just one aspect of the page, see how it affected conversions or search engine optimization using your web analysis tool, and then move onto another aspect.

For pages that needed significant improvement but didn't get much traffic, this process could be painstaking. Multivariate testing allows you to test multiple variants of page elements with the same sample size, and see how each 'combination' rather than each element, affects conversion. Don't ignore it!

2. Utilize multivariate testing AFTER big picture testing
Multivariate testing may be the new gold standard in testing - but it should still come after testing of 'bigger picture' aspects of the site. Internet marketing experts recommend looking first at traffic segmentation tests, then page flow testing through web analytics, and then page layout tests.

After all these have been completed, you will use multivariate testing. The rationale is that targeting tests and page flow analysis might reveal that structural changes are needed - and creating the perfect web page through multivariate testing, and then having to move it around, would simply waste time.

3. Be prepared for more internet marketing legwork from your testing
The entire point of testing is to find out what is working, and what isn't. However, some search engine optimization experts and internet marketers assume that they will only get good results from their tests! Be prepared to find out things like:
You don't get a clear initial answer from your test and need to refine it
You need to do extra work integrating creative across marketing channels for optimal results (in one study, testers saw a drop of around 25% in sales, when people saw a new creative that hadn't been 'warned' about it through another medium).
You need to do extra keyword research
These are just facts of life that arise from testing - remember when you are doing extra work because of it, that knowledge is power!

4. Test many variables in paid search engine marketing campaigns
You will not only need to track the value of conversions compared to bid amounts over the course of your PPC campaign ... but everything. Look at things like:
Ad copy variants
Click through rate
Keyword matching tests
Multivariate landing page tests

About the Author:

InetAsia Solutions is a new breed of internet marketing consultancy.Check out our website to find out more about search engine optimization and much more.

Article Marketing

2 people like this article