As time went by and as I learnt more, and learnt quickly, I received more in-depth answers on Big.TOE but they were still vague; it was never defined to me in the simple terms of ‘Big.TOE is this’. But over time I built a picture of what Big.TOE is or – more to the point – what it is going to be.

Big.TOE is going to be the best use of the data from VITES. Specifically it’ll be a reporting tool.

So, recently, Big.TOE was kicked off by inviting most of the guys for a meeting to discuss the ideas and goals of Big.TOE and to push it into production, I raised my hand to be the ‘project sponsor’, and I was selected. As this is my first project it was suggested that I write a diary… so here we are. The diary will follow in weekly installments.

I don’t think it needs to be that complex. True, most organisations will have some specific needs but 90% of the needs of most marketers should be simple to provide in an easy-to-digest application as most really only need to know:

# Which traffic streams generate what business and how much does that cost

# What is the conversion rate for each of the traffic streams and calls-to-action

# What’s the availability of the web service like and how does the outside world see it’s performance

# How are my A/B tests going, winners and losers please

# If I am using profiling on the web what are the relative performance metrics for each of the profiles

# Some historical reporting on overall performance

Google does indeed do most of this and if you had the time and inclination you could learn how to use the systems and pick out the 10 or so important metrics. Many marketers don’t. This is further hampered by the self-serving approach of most GA Authorised Consultants, as we all know that the first recommendation a consultant makes it order more consultancy!

This has been bugging us (and our clients) for a while so we’re in the process of developing a simpler web performance tool that focusses on the needs of marketers. We’re not suggesting you dump GA quite yet, merely that you consider a simpler, clearer approach to understanding web performance. KISS.

Most organisations, especially marketing-driven ones, are not familiar with one of the greatest web weapons available, namely continual testing. Traditional departments hum their day away thinking of great new “marketing” initiatives and wish they had invented the Meerkat or the two annoying blokes on the Safestyle Windows advert.

Most of what they produce is low-grade, recycled, tat. And that’s a shame.

Some of the brightest people I have met worked in marketing departments, but mostly they weren’t thinking about marketing, they were thinking about operational needs, budgets and getting out the latest offer in the post, by Friday. Ring any bells?

Most senior management and executive boards are not really that keen to sign-off on big changes, especially when “it’s the brand you’re playing with, don’t you know”. So here is a quick one paragraph trick to get them listening and, more importantly, keen to try something new.

Tell them “every company that tried online testing with their website saw at least a 20% improvement in conversion rates, in a month” and “that equates to £100k per month” – but obviously use a figure that represents 1/5th of your online turnover or if you are in the data acquisition world 1/5th of the total number of data items the online world generates for you. That should get their attention! Next tell them to half your salary and pay you a bonus based on performance with the condition that when the online conversion rate has doubled they have to pay you double your old salary. It that doesn’t catch them, which it bloody well should, contact me and I’ll organize a free test for you.

The results speak for themselves and as almost everyone is now getting into feverish testing you’d better start testing…or update your CV.

Here is a brief outline of what you can expect in the next release of the worlds first, commercially available, personalisation and customer journey platform

• Faster core platform, requiring less server computing power and faster serving of content
• In-built AB testing functions, faster, easier testing of content, pages and call-to-actions
• Server load balancing, giving higher system availability, improved fault tolerance and improved performance
• Off the shelf CMS support, de-skilling and speeding up changes to content
• Faster profile management, faster and easier creation of new customer journeys
• Reporting API, simplifying the export of business-critical data giving easier and faster access to real knowledge
• New User Group to support discussions, bug-tracking, feature request and cross-learning between clients

Initially released in 2006, VITES was designed to dramatically improve on and off site conversion rates by providing a scaleable platform that offered proper customer journey management (ala Amazon, Ebay etc) combined with a suite of testing tools that allowed accurate testing of new content, CTAs and traffic streams

Since it’s release, every client using the platform has seen at least a doubling of conversion rates and huge reductions in cost per enquiry/sale

The latest release is a ground-up rethink of what our clients and marketplace needed and part of this was a massive simplification in deployment of changes, testing and profiles

All current clients are on a migration plan to complete the porting to the new version by the end of 2010 and all new clients will automatically get the latest version of the platform

License charges remain unchanged, starting at just £500 per month for the basic 10k users per month version

Contact Liam, Martin or Nick now to find out more about how VITES 3.0 (Rangoon) can supercharge your web strategy.

VITES remains the only commercially available off the shelf journey profile and testing platform

Contact our licensing team (Liam, Martin or Nick) for further information.

System integrators and agencies should contact our CEO (Martin Dower) to discuss how VITES can help your clients

We’ve all heard the “lies, damn lies and statistics” quote and still, all too frequently, statistics have been made “to fit” a required outcome

Most people know that this is wrong but still blindly accept the results, probably from a lack of their own self-confidence to question the results

The point still remains the same and the goal is unchanged; we want to better understand and predict the world around us and mathematics offers us the clearest path to that understanding What’s lacking, quite often, is the right information required to correctly analyse a situation and come to a correct answer

Probability 101

Q. I have two children and one is a boy, what is the probability that I have boys?

Common sense tells me that the other child has (for the purposes of this experiment) a 50/50 chance of being either gender so the the common sense answer would be 1/2. Except that this is not true as is has a precedent (I already have one boy). The possible combinations of children are BG, GB, BB or GG and since I already have one boy this removes GG from the equation leaving the probability as 1/3 of having two boys.

Probability 102

Q. I have two children and one is boy born on Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?

Again, common sense suggests that it will be the same as above, why would the day of birth make any difference to the statistical outcome. But it does.

Let’s, using the above naming convention, call a boy born on a Tuesday a BTu. This gives the following scenarios.

* When the first child is a BTu and the second is girl born on any day of the week there are SEVEN possibilities.

* When the first child is a girl born on any day of the week and the second is a BTu there is an additional SEVEN possibilities.

* When the first child is a BTu and the second is a boy born on any day of the week then, again, there are SEVEN possibilities.

* Finally, there is a situation where the first child is a boy born on any day of the week and the second child is a BTu. Again there are seven possibilities but, and here it gets interesting, one of them has been counted before so there are only SIX possibilities.

Counting likely outcomes we then have a total of 7+7+7+6=27 different combinations and 13 of them include two boys the answer is 13/27, wildly different to the 18/27 (1/3) answer to the first question. This is surprisingly odd and (entertainingly) illustrates that seemingly unconnected pieces of information can make a huge and statistically very important difference to outcomes.Whilst this post is folly of sorts it does have a serious side. When you are trying to measure information to produce meaningful outcomes you really must be very careful to decide what to include and what to exclude. And, you must have a grasp of how to use the information correctly, even if the mathematics required were learned when you were 13.

We’ve been around a while, in fact we’ve been around pretty much since the explosion of the Internet in the late 90′s and during that time we’ve seen our fair share of snake oil come and go. There is one subject that stirs up more than it’s fair share of opinions and that’s SEO…or Search Engine Optimization if you’ve lived under rock for the last 10 years.

Never been a fan really, pretty much decided early on that if you follow the Search Engines’ (read: Google) guidelines and build sites using best practice then you’ll work out nice and dandy. But there does seem to be a huge following and the most diverse advice in this field, so much so that almost every SEO ‘specialist’ will give you different and conflicting advice (for a price, mind).

I do accept that there are some tricks and neat stunts that, to a certain extent, can pull the wool over the engines’ eyes but not usually for long and not usually with any kind of long-term gain. So, making me chuckle this week, then, is SEOMoz telling us all that there is a science to how well you rank. Really? Fantastic!

Except, if you elect to use science to ‘prove’ something then you had better get the science right. SEOMoz may have misunderstood statistics and, worse still, cloaked this bad science in sciencey-sounding words like Mean Spearman Correlation. This has generated a flurry of arguments discussing the various merits of using different methodologies to analyses data. Worth the read, but only if you’re secretly hiding a love of stats.

Some nice rebuts too from Ted Dziuba and Dr E. Garcia – both who warn about paying attention to this kind of science. Alternatively, you can read how Google suggest you go about working with search engines (PDF).

European law is now going to be tested to, in effect, allow people to opt-out forever from being watched on web-sites and with the introductions of Google’s new secure search engine (why exactly did it take them so long to introduce it?) are we seeing the beginning of the end for Google’s free web analytics (and more importantly, the hundreds of other uninspiring client-side, me-too, analytics applications that are peddled by myopic organisations). Clearly the Register think so.

It is interesting to see Google effectively “switch sides” on this and move closer to loving it’s users and somewhat leaving it’s corporate customers out in the cold. Yes, they will say that Google Analytics is free and provided “as is” but so many organisations have (maybe rashly) decided to use it as the standard reporting platform. What are they going to do now, I wonder? The ball is gaining some momentum with a company providing a browser plug-in to disable GA from your session. How long before that is a standard part of the browser and requires opt-in to activate it?

The recent furore over Google’s grabbing of personal data during the StreetView programme, Facebook’s alleged abuse of personal information and now the forcing of explicit opt-in for any cookie will change the game. Cookies are not evil, many organisations put them to really good and productive effect so the challenge for organisations now is to show really good reasons why they should track visitors and do so in an open transparent way and really add value.

Oh, and stop using random free services that are not well understood and have huge privacy issues – it’s just being lazy and treating your customer rather shoddily.

So in many ways it’s been a rear-guard action as we’ve had to fight against the client’s, co-supplier’s and consultant’s wishes to drive home the philosophy of continual testing and letting the masses decide which page, landing zone, micro-site, call-to-action and design is better.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a hard slog and at a number of points we were on the point of giving up but after 2 months showing the results of real numbers and metrics they’re sold and quite rightly they should after seeing a dramatic upswing in conversion rate.

We’re in the final throes of putting together a case study on this client and I hope it will be ready sometime in April so if you want to reserve a PDF version of the case study now then drop me an email and I’ll make sure you get one of the first batch.

This will be the first time we’ve openly shared so much information about how we work and we’ll be showing actual test results with annotated screenshots. The case study is part of our 64Monkeys projects that was kicked-off in 2007 as an internal knowledge base holding the planning and results behind every test we’ve carried out (around 4,500 so far). We’re planning an alpha roll-out of 64Monkeys later this year to openly share and collaborate with our clients and encourage a great deal of cross-fertilisation.

In a word, screwed. The great downside of client-side analytics such as GA is simply that, the tracking is done directly on the visitors’ machine and not at the heart of the web-site and whilst this makes it easy to deploy it also allows it to be easily circumvented. The ideal solution is server-side recording but that’s more involved, more tricky to deploy and requires wider skills and (usually) a, paid-for, commercial solution.

The art of improvement is simple; make a change and then test it. If it’s better then use the latest version as the best and then cycle round again. The compounding effect of making lots of small improvements gives a number of key benefits:

• Continual improvement drives the performance up, relentlessly
• A frequent change culture encourages the testing of lots of ideas, sometimes the daftest or smallest of ideas have a major impact on performance
• Reduction of risk, a poorer performing idea is quickly and efficiently scrapped
• Much wider pool of thinking, more ideas from more people adheres closely to the concept of “the wisdom of the masses”
• Avoids the “Highest paid persons opinion” (HiPPO) quandary where decisions are made at the wrong level by the wrong people
• Compounding small improvement generates a huge improvement over time
• Real learning is possible and this helps the feedback loop for the next test
• No idea is right or wrong – it simply generates learning

The downside of kaizen in the digital world is that most web-site environments are simply not built to allow the kind of rapid change, test function that is required to get the most from this approach. VITES™ at it’s core is built around this philosophy.

Trial and error culture

Connected adopt a Kaizen approach to ongoing development and conversion rates where staying agile and making lots and lots of small changes – each time testing them to measure success – and then moving on again. Connected offer a number of services to help make this happen:-

• Fixed Kaizen contracts. A fixed number of tests or hours in a given period with a planned target to reach.
• A/B testing suites. Utilising the VITES™ platform to provide accurate, reliable A/B testing.
• Profile/persona-based testing. VITES™ supports unlimited profiles and profiles types, each can be tested independently or raced against a “banker”.
• Micro-site build & development. Avoiding the need to completely re-develop a client web-site and provide much of the improvement via a micro or landing-page site.
• Business Intelligence reporting. VITES™ Passport ™ provides a huge mine of data that can be accessed to provide unique learning. Provided as a service or as an API.
• Landing-page heavy lifting projects. The key first-wins for most commercial traffic sites, provided as a service, turnkey or consultancy.
• Performance contracts. Fixed target-based contract rewarded around specific goals and milestones.

Connected provide these services either standalone or linked with existing build-and-manage contracts.

What results can you expect?

Depending on the start point most clients can expect to achieve a doubling of conversion rates during the first year. The law of diminishing returns can apply and often the major advances are made in the early part of the project. Pushing down the “long tail” still has great value and the ongoing refining of the solution frequently uncovers surprises and big jumps on online conversion rates.

Keen to find out more?

Thinking of entering this world? Talk to Liam, Nick or Martin on 0845 051 4228 and he’ll sit down with you and go through the various options available and how to best approach improving your digital offering.