Weboptimiser

[outonalimb]

Hi, just been having a play around with Google Web Optimiser for multivariate testing and the built-in Magento functionality.

Is anyone here familiar with using it?
(I know not exactly SEO, but seemed the closest match)

It looks like you can test variations of Category/Product images, titles and descriptions very easily, which is a great feature, but there are lots of other tests that I can imagine running - e.g. product order within a category, number of products displayed by default - is there any way to do this kind of test?

Regards,

Michael

[edmondscommerce]

tbh Michael I have never actually played with this feature, though I am really interested in it -

being a development agency rather than running our own site we tend to do only what we get asked to do and so far no one has asked us to implement this for them.

I would definitely be interested to hear your views on it though - do you think we should actively push it as something that we offer to clients to help them improve conversion or do you think this is something people are going to be happy doing themselves rather than paying us to do it for them?

[outonalimb]

I think it's a really interesting and useful option. My opinion is that once you're past the start-up stage, any serious e-commerce venture should be split testing. There's really no good reason not to, although the amount of resources available to dedicate to it will vary.

If I was signing up to a maintenance package for my website, including a limited amount of split testing in there (say - we will set up 1 split test every X months or something like that) would be very attractive and, with the right groundwork, potentially relatively easy to do. It was very easy to get it working with our Magento installation, though, as I mentionned the type of tests you can run seem a bit limited without further tweaking.

[NetPowered]

MVT and A/B testing is a HUGELY powerful way of increasing conversion rates.

I've worked for a WOAC (website optimiser authorised consultant) with some large clients and can confirm that if you know what you're doing and have the luxury of sufficient traffic/conversion volumes then you absolutely should be testing.

We ran some greats tests on forms where a single test increased form completion rates by 100%+

But it really does pivot on having sufficient volumes or you'll be waiting a long time for results!