Have you ever wanted to be systematic about testing different versions of a popular page on your site, but felt overwhelmed by questions of how long a test should last, which traffic channels should be sent to the pages being tested, and how certain your results are? Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash is the most comprehensive book available on test design, analysis, and the finer points of both.

Landing Page Optimization book

The book’s clarity is its strongest feature. The risks, advantages, and disadvantages of A/B versus multivariate tests are explicitly defined, and examples that put success in terms of revenue are used throughout the book.

Another memorable aspect is Tim’s observation that both the visits to the site, and the element variations being tested on a page (for example, the font, or a graphic, or any other aspect of the page design) are are independent of one another in effects. This is something we’ve discussed here at Pure Visibility on multiple analytics projects. For example, you may have a page for which you are testing two background colors, and two very different button designs. It may be very well be the case that the color and the button design displayed effect each other, either positively (increasing the conversion rate) or negatively (canceling each other’s positive effects). In this simple scenario, it is relatively easy to add tests for each pairwise combination of elements, to determine the truly winning “recipe”. However, in a more complex test, separate tests of each combination increase the time and data needed for the test. Sometimes, independence must be assumed to some degree. Kudos to Tim for addressing this in a book anyone with basic stats knowledge can understand.