Let me start of this blog post with this very question: Who is the ‘Super Hero’ of your website?
Is it the stunning, professional design? Or is it the various contents in your website? Or is it the functionalities provided by your website? Or is it something else?
Back in 1996, Bill Gates have written that “Content is King”. It’s 2013! Well, it’s been quite a long time. There has been revolutions happened in the Information technology. So, who is the king NOW?The fact is, still the real hero is content! And we have some cool content management systems to manage these ‘real heroes’.
Today let us dig into the topic Multivariate Testing tools provided by ektron, a CMS positioned as leader for web content management by Gartner last year.
What is this Multivariate Testing all about?
We know contents are the most important assets of a website.So it is immensely important to have a strategic analysis of the content of your website in order to improve the traffic and ROI of the website.
Tracking the site visitor’s reaction to each elements of a page and testing a web page with several variations will provide us an understanding on what needs to be done for obtaining better results.The whole idea of Multivariate Testing is to analyze a web page contents with different variations in order to find out which elements drives more traffic.
Want to know more about multivariate testing? Check out the wiki page.
Multivariate Testing in ektron
How ektron does simplify the MV testing?
Ektron provides three out of the box widgets to set up a multivariate test in a web page. Which includes:-
- Multivariate Experiment widget
- Multivariate Section widget
- Multivariate Target widget
By using these widgets, a marketer or business user can set up multivariate tests without the help of a software guy.Its just few clicks and few drag and drop!
Now let us consider example of a landing page where we need to set up Multivariate Experiment. Let us call it as landing page of an imaginary online tutorial website.
And the main elements in this landing page involves,
- A contact us image
- A contact us button
- An Enquiry form
And the skeleton of the web page looks like the following:
Here hitting the contact us button and filling up of Enquiry form are the two actions that the web page expects from a site visitors, they are the actual goal of this landing page!
And every time the site visitor performs any of the above action, he/she will be taken to a “Target Page”, a web page which says “Thank you for contacting us”. And this is treated as a “conversion” in multivariate testing.
We can represent the same landing page with different variations of these three elements by means of multivariate widgets in ektron, i.e. more than one contact us image, more than one contact us button and more than one enquiry form.
This can be compared with the conduct of a running race, to choose the best runner!
Now we can go on and set up race between the three important content elements in the above landing page .Let us take two variants for each element, i.e.,
- Contact Us Image A & Contact Us Image B
- Contact Us Button A & Contact Us Button B
- Enquiry Form A & Enquiry Form B
The contact us image variants can be kept as a male call center representative image as one variant and a female representative image as other variant.
Something like this:
The other elements also can be assigned with two variants in the same way.
Thus this landing page has got three main content elements, and each of them has got two variants. These variants are going to compete with each other in this race; and we are going to make those variants permanent in the page who wins the race.
Which means, those variants drives better traffic and better conversions will win this race!
Multivariate Experiment widget & Multivariate Section widget
Multivariate Experiment widget and Multivariate Section widget needs to be placed in the web page where we are going to conduct the experiment, so first we need to do is drag and drop these two widgets in the ektron page builder page,i.e into our landing page.
Now, in the Multivariate experiment widget we need to provide the ID of the target page, and the maximum number of conversions to be happened before the experiments stop automatically.
This widget will provide the report of the conversions occurred for each variant in the page once the experiment is started.
The multivariate Section widget enables us to set the different variants, by using this widget we can set the two variants of the three content elements, by dragging and dropping the content inside the section widget.
The highlighted ‘+’ button in the image enables to add multiple variations.
By means of this we can add variants to the three content elements in our landing page.
Multivariate Target widget
This widget needs to be placed in the target page, in our case the “Thank you” page. It doesn’t have any user interface. This widget is responsible for logging the conversions in the experiment.
Once all these settings are done, we can go and “Start” the experiment form Multivariate Experiment widget, and publish the two pages.
Yes! We just started a race in our landing page!
Now all we need to do is sit back and analyze the race, see who leading make the winner permanent for the page! Or let ektron do it automatically!
The beauty of multivariate testing in ektron involves the ease of set up and the reporting system. It empowers marketers to make strategic decisions in embedding contents to a web page for driving better traffic to the website.
Check out the ektron documentation for more details on the out of the box widgets and multivariate testing.
So why are you waiting? Go on and set up multivariate testing in your ektron websites for better ROI!
Happy testing!!
