I just returned from the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego where, among the many sessions, I found myself in a room of over 80 marketers who claimed to be A/B testers. I could believe it if it were a direct marketing conference, but an online marketing conference? Has the world of direct response finally made it’s way online in a disciplined and systematic way?
We were all listening to a presentation by the senior director of marketing from TrustedID, Lomit Patel, reporting about his nearly 100% increase in the all important conversion funnel. Assisted by VP of client services from Interwoven, Andrew Eisner, we learned how a multi-variate approach to testing is the next frontier in e-commerce.
Apparently online marketing is growing up in sophistication — not just in optimizing sites for search or bidding for ad spots on Google — but in the elements most in the control of marketing, website graphics, copy and offer.
Please help me confirm this trend.
There are individuals that have been doing this aggressively for years.
For example, I understand that History, Bio and A&E channels online have been doing aggressive A/B testing for years – both in the stores and merchandising slots on the channel web pages. I understand keep the results in a black book to fuel learning across the enterprise.
In the past I’ve been called into clients who expressed the desire to do A/B testing on their own platforms. We spent alot of time addressing the constraints of their publishing platforms for leveraging this testing and providing proper metrics… Very often there was other operational junk in the way making this prohibitive.
But yes, Roy – I’m definitely seeing this being done by smart companies and expect it will become a standard in the future.
Hi Roy,
This is something that’s been going on for quite some time now as online provides the ability to measure and track so much more than ever before. I’d say that if marketers aren’t using this level of testing then they’re behind the curve.