Your First Test - How to stack the deck

So you've decided to take the plunge and start your first experiment -- great! Since content experimentation will mean a shift in how marketing content gets created, you'll want to do everything you can to make sure your first experiment is successful. Once you're able to show your team positive, measurable improvements and calculate the impact on your bottom line, you'll get their stamp of approval.

So to maximize your chances for success, consider these tips.

• Find the weak link.
  • For your first experiment, find a page that gets lots of traffic but is a really poor performer. Every website has at least one of these -- a page that has been modified haphazardly over time, if at all, and is due for an overhaul. There will be plenty of time to make strong pages even stronger, but for your first effort, pick a page that you have a good chance of improving.
• Come up with some hypotheses.
  • Rather than randomly testing any content, start with the problem and work from there. What are the top 3 issues with the current page from a customer point of view? What are 3 ways to potentially address those problems? Answer these questions, and you've got an experiment asking to be launched.
• Make it fun.
  • Find the most highly paid, credentialed, and confident person in your company and ask him or her to suggest some content variations for your page. Label those variations in Website Optimizer by his/her name. Now find a bunch of more junior marketers and try your hardest to come up with better variations. Then track the progress to see which variations are performing better. Nothing like a little competition to get people excited about content experimentation.
• Manage expectations.
  • Even if you make sure you test a high traffic page and limit your test to just 2-3 variations, it's possible you will not beat the original. This might be because you don't have enough traffic to support that many variations, or because your variations aren't different enough from the original to notice a change. It's also possible that some or all of your variations may do worse than the original. In these cases, remember that learning what doesn't work is almost as good as learning what does. It can take a few experiments before you hit on breakthrough content, so set expectations appropriately for your first test. Make sure you tell everyone it's a pilot and that testing is a process you may need to tweak in the future.

For more information, review our Best Practices section.

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