Sarah DeAtley
information + analysis + design
September 22, 2009 at 3:46 pm
filed under Optimization
Tagged a/b, ClickTale, google website optimizer, metrics, multi-variate, optimization, tools, website
As promised, my troubleshooting is done (with Wordpress and GA and Website Optimizer), so I can write about the latest attempt at optimizing something not really worth optimizing. I was encouraged by a couple people to take the plunge with multi-variate optimization, and I finally did. Granted, its just the work section on this site, so there’s very little conversion, but it works! The steps are not too difficult or different compared to A/B testing, and I liked having the ability to test out a wider variety of combinations.
I kept things relatively simple, and tested 2 variations for the control and test. But I also wanted to go beyond having a pageview as the conversion tested, and instead, I set it up so that time spent on page was the conversion. I figured if this page were actually getting lots of views, what I would want to test is if they are reading the content there. Oh so fancy.
ClickTale scrollmap: I want to use this with optimization data
I also liked that I could enter in variation code directly into the Google Website Optimizer UI. Later I realized I should add event tracking to the links, but I could still do that by revising and copying the experiment. I was disappointed that follow-up experiments only allow you to compare 1 combination to the original, so its like going back to A/B testing. That seemed lame, but maybe there’s some secret way around that.
Ideally I would then combine the data from this experiment with other metrics like exit % and pathing to see what that tells me. And maybe scrolling data from ClickTale. Now I want to try these things out on a site with more data! Or on a more robust tool. Hopefully soon-ish.
Related posts:
Tweets that mention More Fun with Optimization | Intersections -- Topsy.com
on September 22, 2009 at 4:48 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rudi Shumpert. Rudi Shumpert said: RT @sarahd23: Just posted: "More Fun with Optimization | Intersections" (http://twitthis.com/5is3wg) [...]