America In Transition: Making Landing Pages Work for You With Multivariate Testing

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Making Landing Pages Work for You With Multivariate Testing

This is a guest contribution from Mahesh Dabade ofTechLila.

Now that products and services have taken up marketing on blogs and websites to a whole new level, you would be familiar with Landing Pages.

Landing pages are specially-designed and set up pages for particular products, services or events. For instance, if you have a product launch coming along for your ebook or ecourse (or e-something!), it makes sense to create a landing page; with custom domain name and related stuff — so that you get better conversions.

Also, when compared to setting up a fully-fledged website, landing pages are easy to be set up and publish, and there are WYSIWYG editors available with landing page creation solutions.

Despite all these, testing is one of the must-have ways to get an effective and converting landing page. Indeed, you’d be familiar with A/B Testing, which has been used as an industry standard for a while. In A/B Testing, two versions of one page (or email mailout, or headline) are compared to each other, to find which one works better, resonates more with people, and gets more conversions.

Now, however, we have a new method to ponder over — Multivariate Testing. In this article, we’ll be talking about multivariate testing and how it can help you make landing pages work. Shall we start?

How Multivariate Testing Works

Before we talk about multivariate testing, you should know about different landing pages.

A landing page may come with one or more elements. For instance, one landing page may have only a well-designed image. At the same time, another landing page may consist of different elements, such as sign-up boxes, images, text, videos etc.

A page may also have some interactive elements such as social media buttons or so. Given that you have different elements in a landing page, you can move towards Multivariate Testing!

Basically, Multivariate Testing is a mode of page testing that involves different kinds of element combinations.

In the case of A/B Testing, an entirely different page is created and tested against the old one. In multivariate, however, different elements are placed in different sections to get different versions.

Practically speaking, one version of page will have the product banner at the top; at the same time, another version will have the text box at top. The higher the number of elements goes, the higher the number of multivariate versions we get. These different page versions are then used for testing, with the traffic the page receives.

Once the substantial amount of traffic has been poured into the versions of landing page, the real analysis can be done.

Multivariate Testing analysis is done by comparing different versions of element organization. Several details will be taken into consideration: the time a user spends on the page, the clicks and scrolls made by the user, his/her reply to the call-to action etc. The input from each version is compared with that of other versions. Then, decisions are made, about the effectiveness of elements’ organization.

So, we hope you have an idea about the modus operandi of Multivariate Testing, as to when compared to common A/B Testing. Now, we will move on to the other aspects of Multivariate testing, such as advantages and limitations.

When Should You Use Multivariate Testing?

There is one critical condition to the Multivariate Testing to give you good results: it’s that your landing page should receive substantial amount of stable traffic. It is only with stable traffic that you can test different versions of a page.

As I said earlier, suppose your landing page has many elements, of various categories. You have different element layouts in your mind, but cannot decide which one is the most appropriate one. So, when you want to choose the effective organization of different elements, you can rely upon Multivariate Testing.

Now that you know when to use multivariate testing, we will talk about its advantages.

Advantages of using Multivariate Testing

The major Multivariate Testing advantages over A/B Testing are as follows:

Multivariate Testing results are quite precise and subtle. In the end, you get a clear idea about how elements should be arranged in a successful manner. While A/B Testing limits itself to the bigger changes, this one is not.
Multivariate Testing is complete factorial, meaning that the whole analysis is done using live traffic. It means that multivariate testing does not bring assumptions into the scene at least while testing. Instead, results are purely based on your visitors and you can count on them.
Interrelation of different elements is also taken into account by Multivariate Testing. For instance, your sign up box and product banner may work together if placed near. Likewise, you can find the successful relation between different objects — with the help of this testing.
Since in-page re-arrangements are suggested, you don’t need a design makeover. However, in A/B Testing, you may have to redesign the entire page. Here, however, you can use the results to optimize your landing page and make it work well.

The advantages are quite compelling, aren’t they?

Disadvantages/Limitations of Multivariate Testing

One of the main limitations of Multivariate Testing is its high traffic requirement.

As we mentioned earlier, there are a huge number of landing page versions you’d get. To test and compare these versions, you need a lot of live traffic to the specific page in test. Not only that, your page should receive stable traffic. If that’s okay for you, it’s all good.

When you are starting a landing page, you cannot really get the results from multivariate results. However, once you have got an idea about the page and have a good background support, you can use this kind of testing. When you’re starting the journey, you will have to stick on A/B Testing or so. The reason is simple — the results are subtle.

Because the testing method is way too precise, you cannot count on it when you want a complete redesign of pages! Otherwise, you will have to extrapolate the results given by multivariate testing. So, in short, it’s for optimization and not for bigger design overhauls.

Another disadvantage of Multivariate Testing is the absence of being sensible in some aspects. As you know, not all elements of your page may have effect on the conversion ratios. For instance, if you have an image that links nowhere, it is of no use from the conversion point of view. Even these elements will be tested in Multivariate Testing —using traffic resource of site —, which isn’t a good thing.

The Practical Deal

According to the experts, Multivariate Testing is quite useful for optimizing the landing page. You are not going to have a design overhaul, but the subtle changes can bring more conversions to you. Just think this way: wouldn’t it be great if you can have better traffic by rearranging your product banner and sign up box, that too depending upon user response? Well, that is what you are going to get via Multivariate Testing. Also, thanks to the factorial nature, it is possible to get crystal clear decisions out of the output.

Conclusion

So, we have talked enough about Multivariate Testing, which is considerably the effective way to test landing pages, websites and other stuff. Given that your site has stable and substantial amount of traffic — depending on the exact number of combinations from different versions —, you can make use of Multivariate Testing.

Also, this testing isn’t useful for bigger design overhauls. On the other hand, when you want to optimize your landing page for conversions and for more profit, Multivariate Testing makes enough sense, I bet.

Do you use Multivariate Testing for your own landing pages? How have been the results? Do let us know through your comments.

Mahesh is the Editor-in-Chief of TechLila. He has a great passion in SEO and Blogging. You can get in touch with him via these modes:Facebook and GooglePlus.

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