I thought this article was going to be about acting differently with your boss and colleagues to see which gets you the most money/respect/whatever you're chasing.
Does anyone have experience with Visual Website Optimizer and its influence on loading time and user experience? With all these Javascript A/B testing services, I'm worried about content flashes and long loading times. E.g. for the JS redirect, the browser would first load the page, THEN execute a redirect, then load another full page. Or the content might change after DOM completion, delaying rendering, or after rendering, causing flashes.
I have seen one of our large customers (can't name them) do this and it is indeed very interesting. What they do is this: they name one variation of the test each for all the team members in the design and analytics team and then make them live in a split test (irrespective of whether they all agree to specific changes/ideas or not). I observed that they consistently get great results for their split tests.
In A/B testing you split traffic amongst two or more completely different versions of a webpage (landing page, home page, etc.) The variations of your original page can differ in any manner. You can either just change the headline; or you can even change entire design, layout, offer and what not in the variations.
In multivariate test, you identify a few key areas/sections of a page and then create variations for those sections specifically (as opposed to creating variations of whole page in an A/B split test).
I thought multivariate testing was testing lots of different variables (as the name suggests) at once, while A/B testing is just testing two variations of one variable at a time.
Edited after eru's comment below:
Multivariate testing is an extreme form of A/B testing.
In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations.
Needless to say, I was very disappointed.