“If you left a hundred monkeys in front of a hundred typewriters for a hundred years eventually you’d manage to get a Shakespearean sonnet.”
~ Thomas Henry Huxley
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for most marketers is like setting up a hundred monkeys in front of a hundred typewriters. Eventually if you tested enough combinations you’ll increase your conversion rates.
Sure, sometimes you can get a quick win. But most marketers will soon hit a wall. They either run out of time to continue testing, run out of guesses, run out of resources. Or they don’t see big enough improvement and consider conversion testing a failure.
Mostly because many marketers are adamant about making sure they test only one thing at a time. They will warn you that if you don’t, you’ll never learn what works and what doesn’t. But, unless you get lucky and change the one thing that is vital to your audience, you won’t move the needle all that much.
The way to get bigger gains faster is to approach your testing strategy differently. To change several elements simultaneously and combine multiple variables together into a single variable-cluster test, so that the entire page becomes the variable.
There is risk in not knowing exactly what contributed to the lift. But the gains far out weigh the downside, because you’re correcting for multiple things at once and you can take advantage of variable interactions you will get larger improvement. Plus, you can run tests with less traffic.
After all, you’re not running an academic test. You’re running a business. You need meaningful results this quarter not next year.
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Great article. For clients new to testing, I often suggest testing multiple elements at once, with the whole page being the variable. This is not to be confused with a multi-variate test, which typically requires much more time and traffic to get results. This is still a basic A/B test, however the entire page is the variant, and we’re still only testing 2 variations.
I consider this innovation followed by iteration, whereas the full page redesign is the “innovation” phase. Based on the results of that first phase, we followup with a series of “iteration” tests (testing the single elements that may or may not have moved the needle). After a series of iteration tests, we repeat the process, continually using the learnings from previous tests for the next innovation phase.
Yes, it’s true with the innovation test you don’t know which change had the biggest (or worst) impact on the results, but the important thing is you are continually testing and optimizing the page.