As online marketing becomes more and more complex and competitive, so too does the need to test.
If you don’t test, how do you know how much money you are leaving on the table? How can you know the true potential of your business online if you never challenge the performance of the pages you have right now?
With just one of our research partners, a major publisher of e-newsletters, a series of tests led us to increase their subscription rate by several hundred percent.
If we hadn’t tested, we would never have known how best to optimize that subscription pathway. And our partner would have a site that would be underperforming to an astonishing degree.
The more we talk and write about testing, and the more students we enroll for our online certification course, the more we see that a major concern for many marketers is the issue of test validity.
It seems that many online marketers shy away from testing simply because they are not confident in the results, and don’t want to make mistakes.
Their fears are well founded, because the worst scenario when testing is to generate a set of results and act on them…without realizing that your data is invalid.
We are working to address this concern in a couple of ways.
First, we will soon be publishing a research brief on the topic of validity, and sharing the results in a teleconference call.
Also, for marketers who are serious about planning, implementing and analyzing online tests, and want to be 100% confident in the validity of the results, we are running our next online testing certification course beginning on July 20th, 2006.
