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.

I finally took the plunge and tried out optimization. I am (literally) surrounded by optimization at ZAAZ, since the optimization team sits near me and I’m hearing about it all the time. I really like the approach that ZAAZ takes, (see here for the ZAAZ process) with viewing optimization as part of a holistic process for website design/maintenance.  Once you analyze the data, you know what parts to improve upon, and optimization prevents blindly implementing things based on what the developer/designer/manager likes best.

All I knew about optimization was that its the process of designing different versions of a page and then testing them to see which performs better.  A/B testing is testing 2 or more different versions of a page (according to Google), while multi-variate testing is testing various sections within a page.  Since I’m a noob, I went with A/B testing in Google Website Optimizer because it is simpler to set up the experiment.

I will preface this with the fact that yes, its a fake experiment that I didn’t put much thought into, and no I don’t actually care about the conversions. Here are the basic steps to setting it up with some notes on my process:

1. Decide what you want to test and how you want to test it.  This is the hardest part I think, though if it were a more important site I would preferably base this on analytics data for underperforming pages, campaigns, or the key conversion funnels. I didn’t care, so I made 2 versions of my usability portfolio page and a super-obvious conversion CTA. I opted to have 50% of visitors see the original and 50% see the test page.
2. Enter in the URLs for the original page, test page, and conversion page.  Easy enough except I wanted to set up 2 different conversion pages, and that did not appear to be allowed.
3. Place the tracking code in each page.  Fortunately this plays nicely with Google Analytics, but you have to be careful about the placement of the tracking code–just after the head tag and just before the closing body tag, and after the Google Analytics code. Then click to validate the tags.
4. Begin the experiment…and wait for the results! It says the results come in within 24 hours, and I’m not sure how accurate that is because as of now I have more conversions than I have visitors. Not sure how that is possible.

Overall fairly painless process, though I’m skeptical about the accuracy of the data I’m getting so far. I think next time I will try out the multi-variate testing though for something more interesting. My colleague Rachel Elkington wrote a great article on combining UX principles with optimization that I also want to try out.

And I seem to not have enough hours in the day to do everything I want, which means the blog posts have been fewer and I haven’t gone running as much. My bad.