Monday, 7 May 2007  Split testing web pages  Why test your web
pages? If you don't, they are unlikely to be as effective as
they might be.  As Sumantra Roy says about the art of making
landing pages: there's no one right or wrong way and you can't
tell what works except by testing.  Split testing web pages is
much more complex technically than testing email. It's easy to
see how one can create different versions of an email article
and send them to subsets of a mailing list, but how do you
achieve the same effect on a web page with a single URL?  There
are a number of different techniques available but each will
generally provide the following:    • A way to serve different
content to different visitors.   • A way to identify visitors
who've come to the site before (so they see the same content
each time)   • A way to record which content was served and
whether it resulted in the desired effect (conversion) or not
• Statistical tools to analyse the results The simplest form of
test is what is called "univar