Cleaning up a Variant Test on the Full Site Experiment - Plus Tips & a New Experiment

The Google Website Optimizer test I put together that basically created a whole new navigation system (see HERE) was daunting to say the least. I wasn't happy with the way the test variant looked, it was too crammed and busy - just messy looking. The goal was to cut down on the options of places to go and combine the sales page into the landing page. I have since cleaned it up a bit, added a new eCover and removed a lot of the other graphics. This taints the test a bit but it is slow going anyway given the small niche the book is geared toward.

One of the most important things when doing a large experiment like this is organizing your pages and code. I basically made copies of the pages involved, and had the old and the new open in my development window at the same time. Since I was redesigning the whole page, I placed the test section tags immediately within the body tags - this made it easy to spot and cut down on possible problems.

The Google Optimizer preview window (and the live site) played some games with the styles - although I was doing a whole body cut and paste, some styles showed differently in the test variant then the original - even though the code was the same for that given part (i.e. some text that was unrelated to the changes I made).

I'm still not sure why this happened. I am a bit guilty of sloppy coding - I'm not a programmer or developer - I just sort of wing that with the help of Dreamweaver.

I have my next experiment planned already and it is something totally different. I'm about to launch a new product and what I'm going to do from day one is test 3 different prices. I'll basically set up three products in Clickbank, which will all be the same except for the price. I'll change the text and the link info in each variant to reflect the different prices. There should be a lot of traffic for this campaign so I'll see results right away. I'll have to look at returns also since the price people pay will affect their decision to return a product.

I'm looking forward to that one.