Online A/B Split Testing Leads to Stronger Web Results

The Challenge: When Legacy Parenting Company,which markets and sells a parental support program for parents of kids with behavior issues, was interested in driving more sales through TheTotalTransformation.com, Timberline looked at the success they had in other media as well as other Web sites for inspiration. They had a full library of powerful video testimonials and a list of potential offers and messages that might be appropriate for the online audience. But, which message would work best?

Timberline’s Approach: While Timberline could not predict what would best promote and sell "The Total Transformation" online, we offered to test to see which messages, online videos, and methods performed best. Due to seasonal variations an offline marketing efforts, it was not desirable to test promotions one at a time. Instead an online split test needed to be developed to eliminate as many variables as possible.

This proved to be no simple task. First, visitors to the site always had to be shown the same messages and offers over multiple visits. A consistent version of the site needed to be delivered to a given online customer.

The Plan: A split testing system was developed that enabled Legacy to create as many different versions of a page as desired and have them served to different site visitors. As designed, the system served the variations of the site and sequence to sequential visitors, not randomly, thus guaranteeing an even split. The system tagged visitors as belonging to a particular page version group and always served the same page versions to that same visitor.

A sophisticated analytics tool was used to track conversion rates of each visitor type as well as to maintain a count of the number of unique users assigned to each group.

“Timberline’s expertise in online marketing has been very, very valuable to us. Our expertise is in helping parents of kids with behavioral problems, not Web marketing. We do know, however, that the benefits of our program are different for some populations, such as Single Mothers, than for other populations, like parents of kids with Oppositional Defiance Disorder – ODD or ADD.

Timberline’s solution provides us with a very flexible and powerful way to test different things on our Web site so that we can show the benefits of The Total Transformation Program to a wide variety of different kinds of parents.”
— Eric Winter, Vice President Internet Business, Legacy Parenting

The Results: Thanks to A/B split testing, Legacy Parenting was able to track how different content impacted visit duration, navigational paths and conversions—and to identify the cost-benefit of introducing new videos and other content to their captal Web site.