Building a Website Testing and Optimization Program: Measurement (Part 3)

Whether you have been testing for years or you are just getting started, building a successful website testing and optimization program depends on careful planning, implementation, and measurement. This is the third article in a three-part series that looks at the steps involved in creating a successful optimization program.

In this article, we’ll look how to measure and communicate the results of your website optimization program.

Optimization Measurement—Integrating Analytics and Testing

Testing platforms and analytics applications are naturally related: One is fundamentally designed to drive improvements on your site, and the other is fundamentally designed to help quantify the value of those improvements. Although some testing applications do a good job of helping quantify success on their own, the integration of testing with analytics allows companies to develop a very broad view of the results of individual tests.

On the subject of measurement, one point is very important and frequently overlooked: The combination of measurement and testing should support both optimization and an incremental learning process about your visitors and customers.

Assuming you have a robust measurement program already in place, the integration of testing into those efforts is often a trivial effort and requires little more than patience. The upside from taking the time to integrate these systems correctly includes the ability to evaluate testing efforts over multiple criteria and the ability to evaluate test participant behavior over multiple sessions.

This article originally appeared in the January 2013 issue of MarketingProfs. You can read the original version here.