We all know that driving traffic (the right type), to a website is major part in a successful site and that getting more visitors to come to a website increases the available pool of potential customers. The difficulty more many people arises in converting visitors into actual customers by persuading them to buy a product or sign up for a newsletter. Website owners can become preoccupied on attracting more visitors to increase their sales. While this may be true in a very general sense, they have to turn to something else besides traffic generation for that critical step of convincing them to complete the action.

To do this, website owners can turn to a methodology called multivariate testing. The idea behind it is simple. The various elements on a website can be changed and recombined into different versions of the same page. By showing these versions to an equal number of visitors simultaneously, an accurate measure of increased conversions may be obtained. This is measured by a metric known as the conversion rate. Usually expressed as a percentage, it is yielded through dividing the number of visitors by the number of customers. The conversion rate is extremely useful because it tells a website owner how effective his site is at leverage its traffic volume.

How Multivariate Testing Works

The object of multivariate testing is to increase sales. It does this by improving the website in terms of how it looks and feels to visitors. A quality multivariate test can tell a website owner exactly what he needs to do to make his website look and feel better. This will persuade more visitors to become customers and raise his profit level.

A multivariate test begins with selecting and defining a goal. The goal is usually an action the website owner wishes his visitors to take, such as making a purchase. This goal then suggests what components of the site will be tested. If the goal is to make a purchase, then the items to be tested include the call-to-action buttons, images, colors, headers and footers on the product page or, perhaps, the layout of the checkout page. Any element on the site may be tested, but a multivariate test cannot handle all of them at once.

The test divides the page into sections, each one containing different items. The items are then all changed in some way and recombined to create multiple versions of the same page. The number of versions varies from less than 10 to hundreds, depending on the site. After each version is shown to visitors, the test results come back. A good multivariate testing platform, such as the one offered by Google Website Optimizer, tells the website owner not only what the conversion rate for each version was, but also whether each rate is statistically reliable.

Considerations

Multivariate testing helps a website increase revenues by upping the number of visitors that decide to become customers. Importantly, the technique does this without the website owner having to spend a penny, especially when using a free service like Google Website Optimizer. The benefits notwithstanding, website owners have to beware of making sure the resulting data is reliable. It can become statistically skewed, which impinges upon the quality of the conversion rates and makes them questionable. Certain factors have to be in place for a successful test to work.

Among these factors is the number of visitors. SEO, social media marketing and other customer acquisition methods all help a website by exposing it to more traffic, however high volumes of traffic also makes multivariate testing more reliable. The larger the visitor sample, the greater chance results will be transferable outside the test to real life. Aside from a large number of visitors, another factor influencing reliability is the relative performance between differences. Low performance variation may skew the results by homogenizing the conversion rates. Finally, the best factor to achieve reliable results is, ironically, a high conversion rate. This may seem a catch-22, but even a reasonably high one will prevent the data from producing bogus results. You can read more at the Maxymiser website on multivariate testing and how it can help.

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