warning: Parameter 1 to theme_link_node_thumbnail() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/diysite/public_html/includes/theme.inc on line 617.

Business optimisation and testing

There are many options you have to improve your business.  It is easy to test these options online and optimise your business.  Setting up test cases is simple and you can have your site do the testing, data gathering for you.

In this section we will be looking at testing content on your site, for more about testing your adverts, see .

The essence of testing content on your site is to create at least one variation of a page and test them against each other.  You can then scrap poor performing pages and create a variaton based on the better performing one.  At first glance this may seem simplistic, but you can use this strategy to test:

  • Pricing
  • Page titles
  • Page text
  • Link text
  • Call to actions
  • Images
  • Colours
  • Plus many more options that may be appropriate to your business

With each successful test we are incrementally improving the effectiveness of your entire business, it's worlds away from working hard just for a pay rise.  Each time you test and improve you increase your profits.

This testing is formally known as 'A/B', 'Multivariate' or 'Split testing'.  'A/B' or 'Split testing' involves testing a single variable, 'Multivariate' testing involves testing several variables at once.  'A/B' is the easiest to do and require the least amount of understanding but it can become tedious.  Multivariate testing is more complicated and requires calculations to be made on the data gathered and typically requires software to perform these calculations.

In order to determine what causes one page to out perform another with A/B testing you need to test one variable at a time.  For example test only different page titles.  Once you have determined the best title, you can then test different page content using the best title.  Testing in this way is so fundamental to increasing the effectiveness of your site.  Can you imagine if you have a series of pages, each tested and optimised.  If you test three variables and each produces an increase in performance of just 10%, this will result in an overall performance increase of 33%! ( 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1)  Now just imagine, three variables over a series of three pages, that's a 99% increase, i.e. This could double your sales each month!  With Multivariate testing you can test many variables at once and accelerate your optimisation, you do however need a lot of traffic for your tests to be conclusive.

Ok, so now you understand why testing can have such a huge impact on your business lets see how it's done.

There are two testing modules for Drupal, ‎Multivariate‎ and google_website_optimiser.module and they both do A/B and Multivariate testing but the ‎Multivariate‎ module requires some understanding of Drupal programming, it is however extremely simple to set up an A/B test.

  1. Install the ‎Multivariate‎ module and the ‎Google chart API‎ module
  2.