Experimentation
Website experimentation involves systematically testing different variations of a website’s elements to determine which version performs better in achieving specific objectives; such as improving user engagement, increasing conversion rates or enhancing overall user experience.
This process often utilises A:B testing (comparing two versions) or multivariate testing (testing multiple variables simultaneously) to gather data-driven insights.
By experimenting with different page layouts and journeys, organisations can make informed decisions based on actual user behaviour rather than assumptions and guesses.
This approach allows for continuous optimisation of a website, ensuring it meets the users’ needs whilst effectively maximising the site’s effectiveness in achieving its business goals, usually conversions and profits.
All experimentation and testing tools are broadly trying to achieve the same end goal but they get there in a slightly different manner and at significantly different price points.
120Feet can support all tools, and right now we’re finding the most popular to be Adobe Target and Monetate.
6 great experimentation use-cases:
- Improving goal conversions: experimenting with different elements of a webpage, such as the call-to-action (CTA) buttons, forms and landing page layouts in order to see which variations lead to higher conversion rates. This could involve testing different colours, positioning, messaging or designs of CTA buttons to determine which version best encourages more users to reach the desired goal. Be it making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or registering for a service for example.
- Enhancing user engagement: testing different content formats, navigation structures, and interactive elements to identify what keeps users engaged longer on the site. This might include experimenting with video content versus text, different arrangements of menu items or varying the layout of articles and product pages to see what leads to increased time spent on the site and more page views per visit.
- Optimising landing pages: focusing on landing pages to test various headlines, images, page layouts and content lengths to find the most effective combination that drives the desired user action. This is crucial for marketing campaigns where the goal is to maximise the impact of first impressions and encourage immediate engagement from potential customers.
- Personalisation and targeting: experimenting with personalised content and targeted messages based on user behaviour, demographics or location to improve relevance and effectiveness. This can involve showing different offers to new visitors versus returning customers or customising content for users from different regions in order to increase the likelihood of a conversion or goal.
- Testing checkout processes: streamlining and optimising the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment rates. This includes experimenting with the number of steps in the checkout process, the information required from the user, the presentation of shipping options and costs and the visibility of security badges or return policies. The goal is to make the checkout as smooth and reassuring for the user as possible, thereby increasing the completion rate of purchases.
- Fixing site issues: not all site issues can be quickly fixed by a website’s developer and as a stop-gap often the experimentation tool can be used to replace out of date, incorrect or broken site content. We only recommend this approach as a temporary fix until a client developer can properly address the issue.
Getting started with, or improving, your experimentation programme
120Feet is a full-stack experimentation provider, supporting all areas from ideation through to technical build, QA, statistical analysis and recommendations.
Organisations just getting started with experimentation may need help with all tasks. Whilst those with an established programme may only need support with technical build and QA in order to ease the most common bottleneck and blocker which is limiting their experiment run rate.
Key steps to deliver an effective experimentation programme:
- Embed a testing culture within the business, so relevant departments understand why testing is important and how it is creative value.
- Create and manage a testing roadmap to ensure you hit your monthly / annual experiment run-rate target.
- Set up processes, create relevant documentation and templates. Having a logical and proven framework is essential to deliver a well-thought-out and effective experimentation programme.
- Discovery, ideation and strategy sessions to gather and develop experimentation ideas. Initially, we’d expect to have a few workshops to hear your experimentation ideas and provide several of our own, and we can supplement this list with analytics insights to identify site conversion issues and opportunities.
- Experimentation briefs: scope out, research, prioritise, groom and estimate experiments. Create a test plan and experiment briefs for stakeholder approvals.
- Technical build and development: build experiments in your tool of choice and solutions to support test ideas.
- QA for the most common devices, operating systems and browsers. Typically, aided by the use of tools such as Browserstack.
- Launch and monitor experiments. Provide in-flight analysis and reports in-line with your statistical methodology. Analyse experiments in a range of different statistical methods. Communicate experiment results and recommendations to your stakeholders to maximise buy-in and develop your experimentation culture.
- Liaise with developers and stakeholders so the site is updated to adapt the winning experiments and become the default way the site should work.
- Over time move to a continuous discovery process.
“We have worked with 120Feet for the past 7+ years.
No project is too big or small, from helping develop our targeting capability in the app, to day-to-day front end Adobe Target development.
They are a flexible and knowledge partner.”
Personalisation Manager, TSB
120Feet has worked with TSB since 2017
“We have used 120Feet for a number of years for digital analytics support and have always had a very thorough and prompt experience tackling a range of analytics and tagging issues and projects.
We are currently being supported with experimentation, helping to fill internal knowledge gap of Adobe Target and Launch expertise, both back-end config and advanced coding of tricky experimentations.
They provide very personal attention to detail and have a number of highly competent staff at their disposal, which helps provide an excellent service.
I would highly recommend them.”
Lead Optimisation Manager, Co-op
120Feet has worked with Co-op since 2017
Delivering better visitor experiences and improving conversion rates requires good quality data.
If you are struggling to get the most from your investment in Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics please get in touch.
We will help you understand where your implementation can be improved and how to go about doing it. And if you are lacking resource or skills, we can take care of the changes for you.
Tag management systems streamline the process and accuracy of managing and deploying various tags on a website.
We work with all leading tag managers such as Google Tag Manager (“GTM”), Adobe Data Collection (previously “Launch”) and Tealium iQ through which we can deploy any marketing tag including analytics, campaign, email etc.
For many clients the process starts with a user requirements and tag audit, followed by a data layer and solution design, through to the configuration of the tag manager to deploy the marketing tags in accordance with an agreed specification.
Delivering web analytics user training spanning implementation, dashboarding, analysis and data manipulation.
Helping clients with data projects. Perhaps to ingest data in to analytics systems or more usually to push data into client owned databases and data visualisation tools.
We are an Observe Point partner and use their tool to automate tag testing ensuring analytics and other tag deployments are working as designed.
Deploy privacy and cookie consent tools such as OneTrust and Usercentrics.
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