MVT and Online Advertising

Every advertiser tests - of course they do. However, are they testing effectively?

When an advertiser launches an online media campaign they will monitor their impressions, click throughs, and ultimately conversions - but do they really understand the triggers of success? The behavior of the consumer? Often the answer is no - however they can claim success by reaching their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) targets while maintaining an acceptable ad spend budget (measured by cost-per-millions impressions -CPM) . We believe advertisers can do better - much better by leveraging multi-variant (sometimes called multi-variable) testing - or MVT.

An outlandish claim by the authors of Breakthrough Business Results with MVT, Charles Holland; "...MVT is the greatest business improvement methodology ever devised"

What is MVT? It is the structured ability to test many different variables all at the same time in order to uncover the greatest impacts to your business. In it's very simplest terms - do consumers click your banner because of a Free Shipping or 20% off? Now factor in other key variables:

Aesthetics; does a green banner do better than a red one, when advertising DVD's? What about Plasma Televisions?

Message; are consumers more apt to click on a strong compelling message or one that is softer, easier (maybe less direct)?

Offer; as we noted above, does free shipping attract more attention than a percent-off offer?

Call to Action; What drives the click behavior? --> Buy Now? Learn More? Take advantage of this offer today? What are you waiting for?

And then there are the use of images, banner types (flash, rich media, video, static) and the banner size.

Now test all of these factors simultaneously! Welcome to MVT, a powerful way of learning more about your consumers and the drivers of online success - more and better leads/sales. According to Forbes, "If you haven't yet applied multivariable testing to your business, get moving.".

Consider leveraging MVT as a means of helping your business deliver more and better conversions, yielding a higher ROI, while lowering your CPA - for your current level of ad spend budget... effectively! MVT offers "real-time data analytics and insights" into consumer clicking and buying behaviors (tm:O3performance). Some MVT vendors include Optimost, Offermatica, 1+X (previously known as Poindexter), SiteSpect and others.

Every advertiser tests - of course they do. However, are they testing effectively?

When an advertiser launches an online media campaign they will monitor their impressions, click throughs, and ultimately conversions - but do they really understand the triggers of success? The behavior of the consumer? Often the answer is no - however they can claim success by reaching their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) targets while maintaining an acceptable ad spend budget (measured by cost-per-millions impressions -CPM) . We believe advertisers can do better - much better by leveraging multi-variant (sometimes called multi-variable) testing - or MVT.

An outlandish claim by the authors of Breakthrough Business Results with MVT, Charles Holland; "...MVT is the greatest business improvement methodology ever devised"

What is MVT? It is the structured ability to test many different variables all at the same time in order to uncover the greatest impacts to your business. In it's very simplest terms - do consumers click your banner because of a Free Shipping or 20% off? Now factor in other key variables:

Aesthetics; does a green banner do better than a red one, when advertising DVD's? What about Plasma Televisions?

Message; are consumers more apt to click on a strong compelling message or one that is softer, easier (maybe less direct)?

Offer; as we noted above, does free shipping attract more attention than a percent-off offer?

Call to Action; What drives the click behavior? --> Buy Now? Learn More? Take advantage of this offer today? What are you waiting for?

And then there are the use of images, banner types (flash, rich media, video, static) and the banner size.

Now test all of these factors simultaneously! Welcome to MVT, a powerful way of learning more about your consumers and the drivers of online success - more and better leads/sales. According to Forbes, "If you haven't yet applied multivariable testing to your business, get moving.".

Consider leveraging MVT as a means of helping your business deliver more and better conversions, yielding a higher ROI, while lowering your CPA - for your current level of ad spend budget... effectively! MVT offers "real-time data analytics and insights" into consumer clicking and buying behaviors (tm:O3performance). Some MVT vendors include Optimost, Offermatica, 1+X (previously known as Poindexter), SiteSpect and others.

Comments

[Dave Morgan at SiteSpect MVT]

Stephen,

the crux of MVT (most commonly "multivariate testing", but synonymous with multivariant or multivariable testing) is the ability to isolate which factors are influential towards user behavior vs. those that are not.

For example, if we were to test 3 alternate headlines + 5 alternate calls-to-action, we'd learn not only which of the two factors' variations were "the best", but whether as a group the headlines were more or less impactful than the calls-to-action.

The results of MVT learning, in turn, let us focus our follow-up testing efforts towards creating/validating new versions of those *influential* factors while not wasting time on new creatives for the insignificant factors.

Another product worth mentioning is SiteSpect ( http://www.sitespect.com ), the only non-intrusive multivariate testing platform. Since no site changes are required, web marketers can test, learn and optimize at an accelerated rate without burdening their IT folks.

-Dave at SiteSpect, Inc.