Who’s responsible for your site’s error messages? Who decides what they say, when they appear, and how they look? It’s a key question—because if you haven’t paid attention to how your site treats visitors when things go wrong, their experience is much more likely to be negative—and talked about.

This article is second in a series I began in July. In that first article, I examined some ways to not only improve the effectiveness of error messages, but even go a step further and optimize them for conversion. Here, I’ll take a look at why so many sites have terrible error experiences, and who should be in charge of fixing it.

(Read the full article here, on Search Engine Land > )

In this video interview, conversion expert Lance Loveday explains the pros and cons of simple A/B split-testing vs. the much more complex multivariate testing:

We’ve found, says, Loveday, that A/B testing tends to deliver the largest gain. Of course, he adds, that this could be A/B/C/D testing - 4 variations of a single factor -as opposed to testing a large number of different factors at one time.

The advantage of A/B testing is that it tends to cause you to rethink the entire user experience as you look for elements to test — layout, visual hierarchy, messaging, etc. Multivariate testing, on the other hand, often leads to testing smaller incremental variations that don’t make as much difference. A/B testing forces you to be more creative about what you’re testing.

Loveday explains that his firm’s process is to start with some A/B testing to find an effective layout for a client. Once that’s established, they’ll do multivariate testing to get some additional incremental gains.

See the original full post here, on Web Marketing today >

In this video interview by Web Marketing Today, conversion and design expert Lance Loveday discusses why it’s important to test non-landing pages.

Historically, he says, the first emphasis was on optimizing clicks to the site using SEO and paid search. The next emphasis was on optimizing landing pages to get the click-through. But there are other points at which a site can profit by optimizing. E-commerce sites, for example, should optimize the check-out process, since some customers leave before completing the checkout.

See the full interview here: