Don’ts in Experimentation (A/B Testing, Multivariate, Personalization) while planning your testing Strategy aligned to digital strategy

“Search engines loves experimentation” 

A. I will love to start with don’t while you guys are experimenting on pages/ forms aligned to your  digital strategy idea we should avoid somethings as they will never give us any outcome & will only consume time & false expectation in the mind of the visitors coming to your web sites

1.       We all agree that it’s time to serve local content to local audience as it really help them know how locally you have become from being global that company looks.

2.       While Back-link strategy is liked by google from the trusted sites global page should try to avoid giving links to local country pages as it simply tells google to give them weight-age on a google.com console where you always want your global page to appear first than the local versions 

3.       Hence the first thing to avoid in testing give back links to local country pages from the global page

4.       So here is the real story:

Just look at the Variation below that will shown to audiences from china (Personalization Experiment) giving back-link from the global page to a local page can help move local page above the global page in GOOGLE.COM console which is really not we want to happen at all at any given circumstance

                                                                        

 Even after 9 days of running the exp & showing the variation to local audience we are still seeing only 4 visits of out 81 visits clicks on the CTA & engagement rate of the traffic https://www.xxxx.com/blogs/xxxx/cn-cn of the traffic clicking going from the global page to local page is down by -1.23% which clearly tells that on the global local content should not be mixed 

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Personalization of these kinds should better be done using ECM likes sitecore, drupal, SharePoint from the server side itself any time  visitors  from a local country lands on a global page from the local page as it tells the search engines father & child relationship on localization journey 

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B. Swapping page band by moving the band further up the fold without doing any changes on the page content 

Assumption made here is : Moving Client Success below “Featured Software & Services” section will help visitors gain visibility to Client Success section will uplift engagement

Position of the Client success has been changed without making any changes on the content of the section 

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See what happens next?

                                                       

In next than 5 working days the results comes negative as engagement rate of the page further falls on the variation drastically. Hence make some changes before moving any section of up/down before testing them

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C. Now what I am write here is like committing a crime which will make your digital strategy really not getting best outcome for sure, so I will say don’t try this at all while doing testing 

I do agree to fact that it is not easy to get organic traffic to your industry specific pages as the keywords targeted are not having high search volume at all hence you need to plan some merchandising plan for it to drive traffic to these pages ie, leveraging owned media or align little paid media to these pages to really start giving visibility to these pages

But if you are only using organic traffic for Industry page & you try personalization using a cookies pool which personalizes the experience depending upon the past visit even you run the experiment for an year you will not even see 1% statistical significance reached by your experiment

So what I mean to say is Personalization works only when it is supports by a good amount of traffic flow else it is waste of time & effort

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So below is unique kind of personalization where on the basis of cookie pool if any visitors qualifies ( (Health care NOT FOR TARGETING) done using DMP will show up the variation page

So this experiment is getting traffic only from organic search & hence even after running the experiment for one year which is wow time.

Even we are seeing the improvements in idea implemented it has not even reached 1% stats significance hence we still can’t say that the idea works or not conclusively. Refer the results shown below 

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Note: All the results shown can be seen inside the Testing tools like Google Optimize/Adobe Target/ Optimizely ( All are Industry leaders in web testing/ Personalization)

Online web registrations forms Best Practices

Online best practices for web forms.ppt from Muzzamil Khwaja

Digital Strategy for your web pages via testing

A/B Test or Personalization Test which is right for my digital business success

While we really plan of digital strategy absolutely to the business priorities & sales target which normally has three channels Paid, Owned & Earned. We need content for each one them to make it really personalized to channel & target audiences

Well not each & everything can be personalized but yes with testing entering digital strategy a lot of things can be personalized & customized

I will throw some scenario & will talk about it why it really made a difference

1. One CTA VS Two CTA (Which one works for my landing page Banner?

     

     

       2. Which colors really creates more visibility on my Important CTA?

   

    3. Moving Navigation vs Static Navigation which one makes visitors reach by long scroll page & navigate easily up & down on page?

1.       

   4. My Traffic comes from various paid channels what content to show to visitors & I want to personalize the page content on the basis source?

If you closely look at all these scenarios they all are unanswered question which needs to be verified with strong proof points like what really works & what not

So with that said we now have Testing Plaforms from Industry leading tools like Optimizely & Abobe experience that will really help you understand is your digital strategy / Digital idea working for you or not

Let pick few of the scenario’s from above

      1. One CTA VS Two CTA (Which one works for my landing page)

      This idea can be very useful onpage where you have fight with your marketing team to convince them that between a whitepaper vs  video vs demo vs testimonial vs analyst repot and so on which one really works on the lead space banner & which one doesn’t and so in such case you can try testing as a rescuer to be conclusive

Like we have one  CTA in the original page while two CTA on the variation 

     Original page                                                              Variation page

 

And Result come's out was like this

Variation page Both newly added CTA & existing CTA got more clicks than the original page


Refer the below  Green highlighted result metrics validating the idea worked which can than be presented to the core team to make a permanent decision to keep what really matters on page

 2. Now lets pick another testing scenario

What color should be my most important CTA ?

Original page                                   Variation Page      

               

The most important Call to action of your website is the place where your visitor reach out to you when they need business help or resolve business problem but is that CTA really visible or it requires searching hence to make things simple try to give the visibility is deservers

So let’s look at a simple scenario if you can see red highlighted CTA (Talk to expert) which is in blue color on the left image above while an orange CTA on the RHS image

Let’s see how visitors reacted to change in color after running the testing scenario for 38 days

The clicks on the CTA went up by 35% on the orange CTA than Blue one & page engagement rate overall also went up by 1.3% which tells Orange CTA  are far better than Blue one’s (Refer below image for reference)                            

Introducing testing with your digital strategy will really help you understand really works in your websites  and what not on a real time basis which will really help you understand you visitor’s behavior & their content needs