You can lead a horse to water but can you make it drink?

Marketing Strategy and Multi Variable Testing:

The original phrase tells you that “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. I don’t necessarily agree with that when it comes to marketing and especially web marketing. I think you can definitely convince a horse to drink, if you know the horse well enough.

Currently I am running  a behavioral targeting and multi variable test for one of our sites. The main purpose being to improve our marketing strategy and online advertising campaigns for our sites and our clients.

Multi Variable Testing (MVT) why is it so important?

According to wikipedia:

“In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous split tests or A/B tests performed on one page at the same time.”

Or in other words, Multi Variable Testing is a good way of convincing your horse to drink, increasing your conversions and improving your ROI

Multi Variable Testing on your landing page:

Using Google’s Website Optimizer I am testing a landing page and have created 3 variations of the original. Once the test gathers enough information I will be able to see which landing page did better, conversion wise, in regards to a specific target audience.

It is possible that for visitors that match one set of criteria the first landing page will be better and for another group of visitors the 4^th one will be better.

The marketing strategy:

Using the information I got while doing my web marketing research and combining it with the results of my MVT, I will be able to create a better match between the visitors that searched for a relevant keyword, entered the site and are then more likely to convert.

The most important thing to remember when compiling the marketing strategy is that the ultimate goal of a site is not to have a high amount of traffic but to convert visitors from visitors to buyers and, hopefully, to leads (depending on the purpose of the site).

I believe that multi variable testing and a correct analysis of the results combined with a good understanding of your market will help achieve your goals and make your site convert better both for paid and non paid organic traffic.

I’ll keep you updated once I’ve run the tests and seen the results.