Optimize your website with Maxymiser multivariate

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On-Site Behavioural Targeting and Consumer Privacy
2008-01-11 17:24:00
In the US, the FTC recently published proposals for self-regulation in the behaviourally targeted advertising industry. We welcome moves towards protecting consumer privacy online and feel that a self-regulatory approach underpins the professionalism of our discipline.Although the some of the principals published for the regulations are intended to govern cross-domain use of behavioural data primarily in the case of advertising networks, they also apply to our work providing people with more relevant and appropriate user experiences online.Behavioural targeting has been a major part of offline business since the very beginning of the post-industrial era (queue the Ford Model T cliché). Online, our interest in user behaviour information is as a means to mathematically improve relevance and service.By knowing the on-site content most effective at converting past visitors, we can make statistical conclusions about its relevance to future visitors with the same traits. These traits cou...
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Welcome On Board!
2007-11-22 10:45:00
Earlier this week we announced we’d entered into nine new partnerships with a range of companies providing complementary web marketing technologies and services. Our partners can leverage our content optimisation technology to add value to and cement existing client relationships. Maxymiser can take the data and expertise that these organisations already do business with and use it to deliver quantifiable uplifts in conversion rates for clients. The key driver for these partnerships is that client demand for onsite optimisation is growing as the cost of acquiring high quality traffic increases. This gives marketers greater reason to focus on getting more revenue from existing traffic. Gone are the days when acquisition efforts could be scaled up with simple budget increases; beyond a certain point, traffic quality becomes an issue and conversion rate suffers. Maxymiser uses artificial intelligence to quickly deduce the campaigns that are having the best impact on resp...
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IAB Winter of Debates: Has online killed the pleasure of shopping?
2007-11-22 10:31:00
Peter Ellen will be on the panel at tonight's IAB debate in London. He'll be fighting the corner for "Online Hasn't Killed the Pleasure of Shopping ". Peter's our MD (services) at Maxymiser and will call on both his extensive high street retail management experience and his time heping retailers form online strategy to make some compelling arguements.If you're in town, why not call in and see some of the industry's leading lights battle it out under the guise of a debate!The event will be taking place at the Rex Cinema & Bar, 21 Rupert Street, Soho, W1V 7FE. It begins at 18.30 tonight, 22nd November.Full details on the IAB UK site.From www.maxymiser.com
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Content Intelligence – The Next Stage in Online Marketing
2007-10-09 18:01:00
In the youthful days of the internet, marketers were preoccupied with building online real-estate. Getting the right domain, acquiring traffic and ranking high in search engines were the key priorities. The rise in online advertising spend is well documented demonstration of this phase; we’ve all seen the graphs with their exponential upward curves.Once marketers got good at acquisition, the brightest ones began to reach the limit of the amount of high quality traffic they could bring to a site in a cost-effective manner. At this point, the focus shifted to analysing what these visitors were doing once they arrived at the site. Marketers wrestled the controls of web analytics tools away from the IT department and began to analyse funnels and abandon rates.Now we reach the present, our top of the class online marketer has taken steps to resolve the big issues that analytics highlighted and is looking for the next way to keep ahead of his (or her) competition.In the UK and European ...
More About: Marketing , Online Marketing , Intelligence , Content , Online

More on Serendipity
2007-09-10 10:43:00
NMA’s feature “Another Way”, published last week explores the role of sub-optimal journeys in online stores and the guys were kind enough to include a quote from me concerning the fact that around 60% of offline purchases satisfy “latent demand”, products that catch the eye of the shopper as they browse the shop.The idea of serendipity, finding one product whilst looking for another is great and Maxymiser cross sell optimisation can help marketers to exploit this in the real world. We would suggest that these additional basket items shouldn’t be considered random, there must be a process to guide customers (without them sensing it) towards likely cross sell and up sell items to really take advantage of this. Just because demand is latent doesn’t mean you can use random activity to get people to respond. If that was the case Tesco would use dumper trucks to deliver their goods to stores and tip them in through the open doors so customers could have a good ...
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Behavioural Targeting is the “Quantum Leap”, Segmentation is just commo
2007-09-04 10:32:00
Our technology has included the capability to segment traffic to a site based on "web environment data", that's criteria such as browser type, operating system and screen resolution since launch. It's relatively easy to do because, believe it or not, your browser supplies this information to every web server it connects to unless you have customised your privacy settings. You might be wondering why this is of any importance. When combined, these three criteria allow you to determine what type of device is being used to view a website. That means we have the capability to optimise your site separately for visitors using different devices. A consumer browsing from their Nokia smartphone while on the move will respond positively to different content than a teenager at home browsing from a games console.We can, in many cases, even distinguish between devices and serve customised content. For example, the optimal page to persuade an Apple iPhone user to convert to a sale could be subtl...
More About: Targeting , Segmentation , Ural , Leap

Test, Test & Test your site to Increase Conversions!
2007-07-25 11:16:00
Today, I'd like you to consider this simple question:Why aren't you performing multivariate testing yet?*We have a convincing case study-led business case for our work and all of our current clients are seeing commercial benefits that are far in excess of their outlay. It's a no-brainer. When used with our market-leading Continuous Optimisation technology, multivariate testing can only increase your online metrics. That means more conversions, enquiries or applications, whatever the metric is that your boss breathes down your neck to increase, we can help you to achieve that.We have a big household name financial institution about to announce in the UK shortly and they, along with our existing clients, are going to see their online performance boosted for very little outlay either in terms of expenditure or labour.Our optimisation will increase the conversions (sales, enquiries, applications etc) of your website from your existing traffic. We know that good quality traffic from G...
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The Benefits of Using Web Optimisation alongside Web Analytics
2007-06-11 13:41:00
As good quality traffic from sources such as PPC, CPM and SEO campaigns becomes more costly and harder to come by, Internet marketers have become used to using Web Anal ytics to increase the conversion rate of traffic once it has arrived at their site. You can spend as much as you like driving traffic to a site but if it only converts 1.5% of visitors to a useful action (eg the sale) then the best way of generating uplift is to focus on user interactions with the site.As one of the first european evangelists of website optimisation through live testing with techniques such as A/B, split and multivariate testing, I'm frequently asked how this adds value to a company that already has web analytics. The answer is quite straightforward and described in this document that we recently put together. I'll paraphrase here but the document has the full details.The primary purpose of web analytics is monitoring the behaviour of website visitors. Through monitoring and analysis of user activit...
More About: Benefits , Misa

Boost Revenue, Cross-Sell with Maxymiser
2007-05-24 12:37:00
In previous entries we've covered the area of multivariate and split testing for website optimisation so I thought I would share a little about one of Maxymiser's more successful ways to increase revenue through a transactional site.Our multivariate testing technology can be easily integrated with a product database or in order to identify and promote cross-selling opportunities. Wikipedia's definition explains cross-selling in a nice succinct way so we won't cover that here but basically on the web it's all about using your site to persuade people to buy extra items in order to increase revenues, something retailers are masters at offline at point of sale.Amazon use very effective cross-selling optimisation and if you haven't visited their site in the last 12 months or so, it's well worth a look. However, you don't need to have a product range as vast as theirs in order to benefit from cross-selling. Banks, IT suppliers (esp. Dell) and grocery retailers are particularly ad...
More About: Cross , Sell , Revenue , Boost

When A/B and Split Tests aren’t enough – go Multivariate
2007-05-04 11:47:00
A/B and split testing are great methods for working out which of two variations on some content will generate the greater sales, registrations or some other key metric. Anyone who has optimised a Google Adwords campaign to any level will be familiar with the concept – you serve two content options to your visitors and find out which one attracts the right leads or makes people most likely to buy.Maxymiser offers the ability to perform A/B testing on web page content; it’s the entry level to our technology. However, to really learn what the optimal content is for your site, you need to be testing more than one area of the homepage.Imagine we wanted to optimise enquiries from the Maxymiser website. We could perform a test to assess the impact that 4 different banner images have on quote requests and also the affect of replacing the ‘Segmentation’ text with a diagram. This gives us an A/B/C/D test and an A/B test as shown in the illustration.Running these two tests at the same ...
More About: Tests , Split

Make Your Content the Star of the Show!
2007-04-16 17:32:00
Maxymiser's focus is optimising your website. The unique aspect to our approach is that we don't have a 'little black book' of magical tricks or any other way to preach to you about what will work best on your site. We can certainly make creative suggestions but the crux is that your users decide what content is going to make them most likely to buy your goods or services!Inside the building we like the analogy that our optimization is akin to a TV talent show like Fame Academy[1]. Our clients take some time designing different messaging, photos and forms for their pages and then we serve the 'contestants' out in equal proportions to web visitors.As web visitors arrive at the site, we monitor their behaviour. The content that makes them click to buy (or register or any other key metric) gains a 'vote' every time a visitor does this. After we've collected in a statistically valid number of votes, we make sure only the best contestants are displayed in future 'episodes'. Ev...
More About: Show , Content , Star , Make , Tent

Turn Browsers into Buyers with Maxymiser – You could be losing 70% of vis
2007-04-11 13:04:00
A client we met with earlier this year came to us because his marketing guy had just run the stats reports for a new website analytics package their hosting company had installed. It revealed that 70% of visitors arriving at their homepage were leaving the site within 30 seconds, never visiting another page.This was bad news for the company; 60% of the traffic to their page was coming from Pay Per Click sources so he may as well have been putting 70% of his budget down the drain as those users weren't interacting with his site at all.The truly worrying thing is that a 70% 'abandon rate' isn't actually that rare. Check out your stats and if you can't view the number of visitors who never click further than the homepage then come and talk to us as our testing can measure this metric as part of the process.For this particular client, we worked with them to create new variations on their homepage designs ready for multivariate testing. In designing the variations we followed these ...
More About: Browsers , Buyers , Turn , Browse

P&O Ferries, National Express Coaches and CheapFlights.co.uk Come Onboa
2007-04-04 10:59:00
Today we're pleased to announce that we've signed up three major new clients, P&O Ferries , National Express Coaches and CheapFlights.co.uk. All of them are keen to see what works best for conversions on their front pages. We're looking forward to working with these new clients to deliver increased conversion rates.For readers outside of the UK, National Express are our main inter-city coach operator over here, a bit like Greyhound in the States and Austrailia. P&O ferries are one of our main ferry companies whilst CheapFlights.co.uk are a leading flight price comparison site. All of these three have a target of increasing conversions (ticket sales for two and quality clickthroughs to partners for CheapFlights) but as we covered in our last entry, Maxymiser can also be used to optimise other actions such as registrations or even the time spent reading a site. I've hyperlinked each so you can find out more about the kinds of companies we're working with. Maxymiser isn't restrict...

Why Do You Need Multivariate Testing? - 5 Reasons
2007-04-04 10:51:00
This is taken from our monthly newsletter, scroll down for 5 reasons why you should be carrying out Multivariate testing!Optimisation of your website is a frequently overlooked subject, good SEO and PPC bring the visitors while Content Optimisation, often forgotten, makes sure they convert (buy, book, register, click through, etc) and bring you revenue from your website. Conversion rate is just the technical term for the percentage of website visitors that complete your set goals. If it's an e-commerce site selling widgets, the conversion rate is the number of people successfully buying a widget as a percentage of the total number of visitors, it's that simple! Here's a diagram too: 1. Know What Works (& What Doesn’t) – Never worry about whether particular site content helps people convert or not. Test it and see. If something doesn’t help, remove it, if it helps then do more of it.2. Increase Conversions Without Increasing Spend – Your existing PPC and banner campaigns m...
More About: Testing , Reasons

Multy-whatty Testing?!?
2007-03-20 14:29:00
Multivariate testing is a frightening sounding term but in reality, it’s quite simple. What it does is take all the guesswork and old wives’ tales out of creative decisions for websites. We’ve all been there; the web designer says the "add to basket" button should be on the top right, marketing reckon bottom right and the MD gets involved wants it on the left!These arguments can (and should) crop up daily in any online business that’s going places. There’s no way of telling who is right without testing because although bottom right will work for some sites, top right might work for others. Try asking your web guy to set up a head to head test of all three positions and the resulting workload is likely to make him just give in and side with the MD’s suggestion. Even if you do go ahead and set up a three way test, there’s a big technical labour overhead with setting that up to display each location of “add to basket” button to display to 33% of visitors then you’d ...
More About: Testing