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An exceptionally good piece of creative/practical work about Online Testing Aug 3, 2008 (23 of 24 found this helpful)
When I first saw that this book was coming to light I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I was hunger for more testing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. On the other hand, I am always apprehensive when books talk about tools. However, the book impressed me as a comprehensive guide to Online Testing. And when I read the following (p.18), I was sure the book is what the market needs:
"The important thing to keep in mind is that the Google Website Optimizer is a tool. (...)It cannot do your thinking for you. It cannot plan your tests. It cannot produce the creative. It cannot interpret your results beyond demonstrating numerical significance and confidence. These things are up to you. If you want the tests you run on the Google Website Optimizer to be meaningful and to provide the intelligence you need to make well informed marketing decisions, then this is the book you need."
The authors cover very thoroughly the Why, the What, and the How of Online Testing. All you need to know from the value of testing to how should you get started. The examples are very enriching and illustrate the power of testing and the bottom line: Testing = $$$.
Part I covers the Why; the authors delve on the power of testing and provide some amazing examples of it (including a masterpiece on Amazon's testing efforts). In addition they walk us through the Google Website Optimizer and provide powerful tips on the tool.
Part II covers the What and the How; the chapters are structured in a very actionable way: "Questions to ask", "Exercises", "What to test", and "Apply this to your site". As you read you can implement the tips instantly. A few examples of what to test are: usability, look & feel, searchability, product presentation, up-sell/cross-sell......
Part III covers some technical aspects of testing. The authors provide interesting information about Google website Optimizer scripts, statistical tests, and other special issues.
*The book is well structured, insightful and action oriented: exactly as online marketing should be! I warmly recommend it.*
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Modern Day Scientific Advertising - a Contemporary Classic For Today's Marketer Sep 7, 2008 (11 of 11 found this helpful)
As someone who has spent some four decades in direct response advertising, I know the value of testing. Like all successful ad people and many successful marketers, I have read and re-read the classic, "Scientific Advertising" by the great Claude Hopkins. It's a classic --- even to this day. Of course, it's quite dated.
Fast forward to "Always Be Testing" by Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar with Lisa T. Davis. This book brings Hopkin's important work into the modern age and again puts testing to the forefront, where it belongs. And no one is better qualified to write the book than Eisenberg.
The authors explain Google Web site Optimizer in detail. They show how to use it and how to perform your Web site tests. They discuss the A/B test and the multivariable test. But they go beyond that. They tell you what to test and how to test.
Moreover, they go beyond Google Web site Optimizer and discuss other things to test. All of this information will help you to get far more conversions. With all we have at our fingertips, not testing is just inexcusable.
In my opinion, this book is a modern day classic and is as valuable to our time as Hopkin's book was to his. I hope all my clients read this book and absorb it. I hope they put it into practice.
I've had many experiences when I didn't like the copy I wrote and yet it worked exceedingly well when it went live or, if direct mail, was sent out. I've also had clients who didn't like the copy I wrote for them but I'd tell them to test it. When they did, it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
So testing is key to success in marketing. This book is a must-read if you intend to be successful in your online marketing. I highly recommend it to you.
- Susanna K. Hutcheson
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Must have book for any ecommerce or lead generation website manager Oct 15, 2008 (9 of 9 found this helpful)
If you are managing a lead generation or ecommerce website you must read this book.
After reading "don't make me think" I honestly did not believe another
book related to web design could have as much value or impact on
someone 10+ years of web experience. I expected A/B Testing to be a
basic instructional manual on how to use Google Website Optimizer so I
didn't bother to buy it. Lucky for me I attended the SES conference
where Bryan Eisenberg was giving away free copies. Our company, Blast
Advanced Media, has since taken our testing and objectivity of our
website optimization to a level where we are achieving much higher
micro and macro conversion rates for our clients.
Some of my favorite aspects which provided much more value than expected are:
-Persuasive Copywriting
-Understanding what to test
-Whats in it for me
-Unique Value Proposition
-The Buying Decision
-Categorization
-Purchasing
-Customer Focused Language
-Great examples such as Categorization, Trust, Reviews, Up-sell
-Breakdown of questions to ask, what to test and how to apply the many testing examples to your site
In one recent test, we used the principles learned from the book such as persuasion architecture to setup a test in only an hour that increased lead generation on a high volume ecommerce site by 51% (greatly exceeding the test hypothesis of a 15% increase). Other ecommerce optimization tests are on track to deliver six to seven figure annual revenue increases. So the return on investment from the ten copies we have purchased has been so high that we feel guilty. Thanks Bryan! Of course, this is why we wanted to show our thanks by writing this review.
Testing not only gives you impressive results like this but it makes it much easier to work with your clients when you can demonstrate the impact of changes and measure the results to build more value for your service fees. Plus it allows you to offer pay for performance fee structures to lower a client's risk in these current adverse economic times in the USA.
Thanks again to Bryan for sharing his deep knowledge related to website testing/optimization as it has taken our marketing strategists, designers, and most importantly our engineers (who all permanently have a copy on their desk) to a new level of objective thinking and understanding around the importance of the smallest details in web development.
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Worth buying and keeping on your desk Oct 6, 2008 (6 of 6 found this helpful)
I like to pick up marketing and business-technical books as much as I can, and read them in the evening to get ideas for improving my small business. Usually I get books from my local public Library (sorry Amazon) but this book was not available there. I'm extremely glad that I bought the book, because it is going to be living on my desk for the next year, not collecting dust on a shelf now that I've read it.
I had heard of Google Website Optimizer before but I had been a bit daunted at the idea of "optimizing" my website. What am I supposed to optimize, and why? This book is really everything I need to get going. The reason that I want to keep this book around is that there is just too much information to work with in one sitting. Each time I am ready for a new test, I will turn to this book for some ideas of what to try, and what variations might be good to try. For each area there are dozens of URLs of articles that are relevant to that kind of test, and I will be visiting those URLs when I am ready for that test. (No point in visiting them yet, there is just so much information.)
This book, then, is not just a tutorial or a technical manual, but an entire *curriculum* of website testing.
But it's more than that. If I'm going to be attempting to improve some aspect of my website, it would be useful to have some useful hypotheses of what might be an improvement; making shots in the dark isn't likely to be as effective. The WIIFM chapter reiterated many of the concepts I had read about in other books (such as types of website visitors) but this is the only book I have seen to actually have some suggestions for how to actually address these visitor types on your landing pages.
So I have to think of this book as a great *marketing* book, not just a great book about Google Website Optimizer.
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If you want to start testing and optimizing your website, start with this book Feb 1, 2009 (5 of 5 found this helpful)
This is a exceptionally well written book on website optimizing and covers a lot more than Google's Website Optimizer. The authors clearly show you how you can benefit from optimizing various elements of your website.
You will get
- a good summary of why and how to optimize with lots of examples
- awful lot of ideas what to optimize and how to try them
- some technical info (but note that this is not the focus of the book)
It is aimed at beginners and does a very good job of introducing the subject and giving ideas to begin testing with.
If you have enjoyed Waiting for you cat to bark then, by all means, read this book. It's the same approach but put into practice.