'Net Features : sitespect

Optimize What's Behind the UI

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:04:00 GMT

There are many types of optimization software on the market. While most focus on what's happening on the UI layer, there are several which dig a little deeper, exposing opportunities to optimize what's underneath - the software features and functionality, the algorithm and infrastructure components - those components which also contribute to the optimal user experience (whether it's obvious to users and you as an Internet professional or not).

Optimization solution SiteSpect is one vendor serving enterprises also interested in optimizing that underlying experience for users. Today the company released a new solution dubbed Origin Experiments which can be used by Internet retailers to assess the impact of new feature releases in real-time, segment features to present functionality to different audiences, make head-to-head comparisons of different versions of search algorithms, conduct price experiments such as "free shipping", as well as the checkout flow. For example, with Origin Experiments it's possible to test the impact of a 5-step versus 3-step checkout process and quantify the impact.

“The rapid growth in adoption of agile practices, fueled by increased competition across online brands, has led to a steady increase in the pace of new site releases and other development efforts,” said Eric J. Hansen, Founder and CEO of SiteSpect. “At the same time, the growing focus on measurement and analytics has put increased pressure on product teams to quantify the impact of their efforts, and generally become more sophisticated around their use of user behavior data to guide site improvement. SiteSpect Origin Experiments addresses both these needs by enabling site operators to optimize the features and functionality of their site to quantifiably improve the user experience.”

Designing Websites for Multivariate Testing, Key Considerations

Administrator — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:45:00 GMT

:: By Kim Ann King, Chief Marketing Officer, SiteSpect ::

If you are like most digital marketers, you are doing everything you can to optimize your website. One of the best ways to optimize your site is through multivariate testing, which is a technique that enables your visitors to tell you what’s working on your site and what isn’t. In a multivariate test, variations of your site’s content are presented to visitors. As visitors navigate through the site, their behavior is tracked to determine how each content variation affects marketing goals such as conversion, registration, retention, average order value and so on.

While multivariate testing is an effective and proven technique for optimizing a site, some sites can be made easier to test than others. Technical factors such as the structure of the HTML come into play in determining how much preparation you will need to create a new multivariate test. But since testing is so valuable in terms of giving you insight into your visitors' preferences and behaviors, it’s well worth considering how to make your site more readily testable. Doing so will yield a competitive advantage that makes it possible to out-test,out-learn, and out-optimize competitors.

There are a few times in your website’s lifecycle that are ideal for considering how to make your site more testable. For example, building a brand-new site or redesigning your current one gives you the perfect opportunity to apply some best practices and make your site’s elements easier to test. Another good time to prepare your site for multivariate testing is when you are adding major new content or functionality, where those new elements can be carefully introduced on the site so as to maximize their effectiveness without hindering existing site goals.

An interesting observation in the business of website design is the age-old struggle to balance a great-looking website versus a great-working website. Ideally, you want both, but the primary requirement should be a highly functional site that achieves your online marketing goals,instead of just a pretty website.

Here are four key considerations in preparing your site for multivariate testing success, which represent the fundamentals of making content testable:

1) Think About Your Mobile Visitors First

Mobile Web traffic is on the rise, and it’s far easier to create a simple mobile site that works with all devices than to build a complex, rich desktop website that needs to be scaled down for mobile users. You can use mobile targeting to understand which devices are accessing your site and test which content variations work for them.

For example, VEGAS.com ran a mobile A/B test that was able to quantify how mobile-optimized content influenced user behavior. In its tests, VEGAS.com decided to focus on key content that users were already accessing via mobile, namely the Homepage, top-level category pages such as hotels and shows, and the hotel room search tool. It turns out that VEGAS.com's mobile content outperformed regular non-mobile content across a number of key metrics. Some of the notable improvements that they achieved were:

• 22 percent reduction in bounce rate

• 16 percent increase in page views

• 14 percent increase in hotel searches

• Double-digit lift in conversion rate

2) Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS is a popular choice for Web design consistency and standardization, and that’s great news for multivariate testing. Among other things, CSS centralizes site-wide styles such as text and headline specifications (font, style, color, size), page layout, and positioning of elements. So, when you make a CSS change , you change it in one place and the style is updated everywhere on the site. This makes it much easier to test multiple variations of site elements since you don’t have to wrestle with changes in multiple places, which you would have to if you weren’t using cascading style sheets. CSS is a key element in Responsive Web Design.

For example, a recent test for a B2B site revealed that by increasing the size of body text by 0.2 “em,” the time-per-visit increased by 21 percent and pageviews-per-visit increased by 18 percent. This test was highly fruitful, and because only one line of CSS was changed, it was very easy to design and deploy.

3) Employ Text-Oriented Navigation

In the past, Web designers often relied on images or Flash for navigation text elements, particularly for sites that were built before 2004-2005, since browser technology was such that CSS couldn’t be relied on for precise positioning or stylization of text and labels. Unfortunately, using images or Flash for navigation has the side effect of making it difficult to test alternate text labels—for example, to test “My Preferences” vs. “My Profile” vs. “My Settings.”

Since browsers have become much better at supporting CSS, there’s little reason to rely on images or Flash for navigation. Text links are much easier to modify and control, and thus are much easier to test and optimize.

But why bother testing navigation? Because they’re the milestones by which visitors step through your site to accomplish their tasks and reach your marketing goals. The best product, price, or promotion is no good if the visitor can’t grasp which link to click on to find the information they need, or to get to the next step in your site’s conversion process.

4) Use Responsive Web Design

Websites built from a Responsive Web Design perspective utilize an adaptable, fluid layout, media queries and flexible image sizes. That means a site’s elements can be added, removed or rearranged without interrupting or breaking the presentation of the surrounding content. Besides being a good design principle that makes the site more accessible across varying screen sizes, Responsive Web Design also makes multivariate testing much easier because you can determine which layout is most effective.

For example, an online jewelry retailer wanted to determine how cross-sell items should be displayed relative to customer product reviews. Because the site had a responsive design, a multivariate test was easily constructed that optimized the arrangement of elements within the page, leading to a 16 percent increase in average order value. And remember that sometimes “less is more,” meaning that visitors may prefer less cluttered pages as they browse your site. Responsive Web Design makes it possible to remove elements on your pages in order to determine the optimal amount of information that should be shown.

Another factor to consider about layout is that different types of visitors scan content in different ways. For example, older visitors who grew up without computers may view a page’s sections in a different order than younger visitors who have been “wired” since birth. Similarly, behavioral differences exist based on gender, education level, and language spoken.

And remember, the optimal layout is dependent on device. Analyses of consumer behavior have shown that mobile users have different needs and expectations than desktop users — environment, task-at-hand, and physical device constraints all differ, often dramatically. By making it easy to adjust page layout through the use of Responsive Web Design, you’ll be able to test and optimize for the audience and device that is unique to your site.

Summary

Overall, you’ll want your website to be modular, flexible, and easily testable. These are the qualities that make a site usable for your visitors and will support thorough optimization toward reaching your marketing goals. Multivariate testing is an advanced technique that enables you to increase revenue, turn browsers into buyers, and enhance your key performance indicators, whether that’s conversion rate or average order value.

About the Author

Kim Ann King is an award-winning marketing executive and has been a B2B software marketer for more than two decades. She currently serves as the Chief Marketing Officer of Web and mobile optimization firm SiteSpect.

Optimizing for Speed

Linc Wonham — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Web marketers have spent the last couple of years getting a grip on web analytics and A/B testing so they can measure user behavior, learn what works best and methodically improve their sites.

Today, when we talk about site optimization, we’re usually referring to the content that a user sees – the graphics, copy, layout and offers – and then testing is focused on tweaking these elements to make the site more persuasive, usable, relevant and engaging. While these efforts are absolutely necessary, now that measurement and testing have become staples of the web marketer’s toolbox, another trend is emerging: optimizing for speed.

Recent studies published by Amazon, Google, Bing, Yahoo and others reveal a direct connection between site speed and user behavior. The faster a web site’s page-load speed, the better the user experience, as measured by higher conversion rate and greater engagement levels. It’s fair to say that given two sites which are identical in every way except for speed, the faster site will have the competitive advantage.

So how do you measure and optimize for speed? Free tools like webpagetest.org and the Yahoo! “YSlow” add-on for Firefox can provide you with a speed grade (A-F), detailing why your site is slow and then making recommendations for improvement. There is also an emerging industry called Web Performance Optimization (WPO) which specifically aims to deliver products and services which make it easier for site owners to shave seconds off their page-load times.

Fortunately, not only are there tools and well-documented techniques for increasing speed, but as a Web marketer you already have two of the most important tools already in your arsenal: Web analytics, for measuring changes in KPIs like conversion rate, and A/B testing, for learning how users respond to site changes.

So, when trying out speed-savings techniques – for example, combining multiple JavaScript or CSS files into one – you should always test them first and then measure impact on user behavior. Testing and measurement remain two of the core capabilities that enable you to continually improve your site. Only now, you should be thinking not only the visual elements, but also the underlying page elements that influence page speed.

This post was contributed by Eric J. Hansen, founder and CEO of SiteSpect.

Increase Page-load Speeds with SiteSpect AMPS

Linc Wonham — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 02:00:00 GMT

SiteSpect has launched a Web and mobile performance optimization solution that leverages the power of multivariate testing and behavioral targeting.

In recent customer deployments, SiteSpect’s automated multivariate performance optimization solution (AMPS) has decreased page load times by as much as 50 to 70 percent. Faster websites not only improve the user experience but also increase conversion rates and average order values. Additionally, major search engine crawlers are now evaluating site speeds in their algorithms and ranking faster sites higher in search results.

Any type of site can be optimized with SiteSpect AMPS including e-commerce, publishing and social media, intranets, extranets and mobile-specific WAP sites. AMPS measures not only speed but also key performance indicators including bounce rate, conversion rate, average order value, abandonment and compound metrics that look at multiple behaviors both within and across visits.

Below are some of the key features to SiteSpect AMPS:

•    On-Page Optimization – reduces the size of CSS and JavaScript files, combines scripts, and reorders elements for optimal processing and rendering.
•    Cache Optimization – adjusts content cache settings to reduce network overhead, thereby decreasing page load time while simultaneously increasing Web server capacity.
•    Dynamic Parallelization – optimizes the browser’s ability to retrieve content by increasing parallelism, without requiring any change to the server or browser.
•    Network Optimization – SiteSpect's global private cloud utilizes real-time network measurements to determine fastest paths from any end-user location.
•    Cloud Delivery – SiteSpect's built-in cache positions content closer to the end user for reduced latency when delivering static content.
•    Modular Architecture – allows clients to test, measure the impact of, and deploy third-party performance solutions such as CDNs and open-source tools such as Steve Souders' ControlJS.

SiteSpect AMPS is available as either an on-premise enterprise appliance or a cloud-based ASP version, and both versions integrate seamlessly with SiteSpect's content testing and targeting solutions. Visit SiteSpect for more information.

Site Testing – The Gift That Keeps Giving

Linc Wonham — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 23:59:00 GMT

Not until Vegas.com enlisted SiteSpect to run some simple tests did the travel/destination website realize how much revenue it was losing because of its mobile strategy. Within a month and a half, Vegas.com had a new plan in place that has already dramatically increased conversion rates.

Implementation of the live A/B testing took only a matter of days, and Vegas.com had quantifiable results to evaluate after a little more than a month. Once it was able to determine the specific needs of Vegas.com’s growing mobile audience, SiteSpect offered a mobile website strategy that continues to produce optimal ROIs and higher revenues.

SiteSpect provides these and other services for companies such as NewEgg, Mozilla, Overstock.com, ShopNBC and many others. Through its non-intrusive A/B and multivariate website testing, SiteSpect provides its clients with the tools required to evaluate the statistical data needed to get the best results.

Today’s website testing methods and processes are faster, easier and more cost-effective than they’ve ever been, a fact that too many business owners have failed to realize. In addition to SiteSpect, there are numerous capable vendors who can put your site on the right track for 2011.

Two new companies in the website testing space are Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer. Both have launched in the past year and offer A/B testing for prices ranging from $20 per month to $400 per month – and both also offer free trials. SiteSpect has website optimization and targeting capabilities, in addition to its wide-ranging testing solutions, and pricing is established on a case-by-case basis with the help of a company representative.

Google ACE Tool Goes Global - Split Testing Adwords

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:38:00 GMT

Google's AdWords Campaign Experiments or ACE (a free tool for testing and measuring changes to keywords, bids, ad groups and placements) announced in early August 2010 is now rolling out globally.

What will be appealing to advertisers is that experiments can be set up to measure the impact of changes with just a small percentage of your traffic. ACE runs experiements side-by-side (split testing) with the existing campaign and provides indicators of where performance is significantly different.

The potential uses are pretty broad. For example, you could add new keywords and measure that tactic's affect on overall campaign clicks, costs and conversions. Or you could test increasing or decreasing bids on high value keywords, or test new landing page designs.

Keep in mind that ACE is designed as a split testing tool - e.g. testing two different landing pages for a keyword, ad ad, or ad ad group directly in Adwords. To test more than two (multivariate testing) landing page designs , to test a landing page with multiple traffic souces or test multiple elements on the landing pages, you should still use Google Website Optimizer or one of the many other testing solutions including Adobe Test & Target, Amadesa Customer Experience Suite, Autonomy Optimost, Maxymiser Content MVT, SiteSpect, Vertster Conversion Optimization Suite, or Webtrends Optimize.

To get started, sign into AdWords and access ACE on the Campaign tab under Settings. For those outside the U.S., this is a rolling launch so you should see it within a week. As a side note, ACE is supported in the newest AdWords API version announced today.

SiteSpect Mobile Content Testing and Optimization

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:15:00 GMT

SiteSpect unveiled new Mobile Web Optimization functionality within its multivariate and A/B testing solution this week.

With nearly three billion mobile device owners worldwide, 75 percent of whom have access to the Internet according to the Online Publishing Association, a huge opportunity exists for web markers to deploy and optimize mobile content. Unfortunately, it is difficult to perform mobile content optimization such as testing and targeting due to compatibility issues across the more than 2,000 types of cell phones and PDAs used worldwide. For example, many mobile devices have limited or no support for JavaScript or cookies, making it impossible for traditional optimization approaches to work for all visitors. The risk is that by testing and targeting only compatible devices, campaign data is biased towards certain demographics, thus leading to incorrect analyses and missed opportunities.

SiteSpect’s Mobile Web Optimization may solve the problem of device compatibility because it is the only multivariate testing and behavioral targeting platform that works with all mobile devices. The SiteSpect solution does not require JavaScript or cookies, and is able to test and track behavior across any type of content including WML, HTML, CSS, streaming media, and more. This capability enables mobile site operators to non-intrusively test variations of any content and track visitor behavior, revealing which versions are most engaging and persuasive.

sitespect mobile web multivariate testing mobile web optimization

Testing and Optimization: SiteSpect, CSN Stores Study

Administrator — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:20:00 GMT

SiteSpect has helped leading online retailer CSN Stores increase their sales by 7% by utilizing their non-obtrusive website conversion optimization technology....(read more)