Testing Obstacles Melt Away.
Experimenting with big concepts like messages, page formats, number of pages or segmentation options can change the entire ballpark of your results.
The ion platform lets you test just about anything you want—with point-and-click ease.
There’s nothing to install, and no coding required. ion’s cloud-based technology means you can be launching your tests in minutes. With ion’s WYSIWYG creative studio content editor, you can easily create many test-worthy versions of landing pages, conversion paths and microsites for A/B or multivariate testing without design or IT resources.
ion’s interface for MVT experiments is simple too. Create your page, and then point-and-click to add your variations for testing and go live. It’s really that simple.
When A/B or multivariate testing with ion, you can choose to manually optimize your tests, or leave auto-optimization to the platform. ion can automatically optimize for you, directing traffic away from under-performing options once statistical significance is reached.
You can view your test results in real time, and set up automatic reports in .xls or .pdf formats to distribute to stakeholders in your organization.
“On Mother’s Day alone, the real-time change in traffic splits resulted in over $45,000 in incremental revenue. That’s revenue that would have been lost without ion’s actionable, real-time approach. We don’t continue to lose on any test—we auto-optimize as soon as we have significance.”— American Greetings
Point-and-Click A/B/n Testing and Automatic Optimization
One of the most powerful features when testing with ion is how the platform handles URLs and tests. To test for any specific campaign or type of traffic simply create a URL within the platform and point-and-click the experiences you want to test on that URL. Create as many of these URLs for testing on as many unique sources of traffic and you wish. A single URL can be used over and over again for multiple waves of testing—making it easier for you to distribute URLs once and test many alternatives over time.
A/B/n-specific Testing Features
- Test as Many Alternatives as You Like—A/B is a misnomer. ion lets you test as many alternative user experiences as you like. Simple slider controls let you include alternatives and optionally vary the percentage of traffic that is randomly sent to any alternative. Once a user is assigned to an alternative, ion writes a cookie so that the user will see the same alternative on repeat visits.
- Traffic Distribution Control—By default, ion will evenly and randomly distribute your traffic to whatever user experiences you have chosen to include in a test. You can override ion’s even distribution by sending more or less traffic to particular experiences—giving you the freedom to manage how much of your traffic you send to new challengers in later-stage test waves.
- Automatic and Manual Test Optimization—Over the course of a test, ion can automatically optimize your flow of traffic based on conversion-rate performance. When statistical confidence is reached, ion will automatically remove the underperforming experience from a test. For any traffic source URL, you can also choose to manually optimize the flow of traffic.
- ion includes SEO-focused features including explicit SEO user experience flagging and canonical URLs for pointing the engines to the authoritative version of the content.
Point-and-Click Multivariate Testing (MVT) of Forms, Text, Images, (Even Flash)
Multivariate Testing (MVT) becomes useful when tests can be designed and easily executed by content owners. Only then can in-page testing become agile enough to yield real-world benefits that exceeds the resources required to execute the tests. ion was designed to make MVT a seamless, integrated part of day-to-day marketing program management.
In-page multivariate tests can be run on their own or within A/B/n tests. No coding or technical expertise is needed to test variations of forms, images and content. Multivariate tests can literally be setup and run within minutes—without a drop of code.
MVT Features
- Content Integrated MVT Interface—Multivariate testing in ion is completely code free. To test a variation, click on the original element, create one or more alternatives and click to run the experiment. Vary text, images, forms and even text and images within dynamic Flash.
- Experiment Duration Estimator—ion enables testing of as many variations and combinations as you like. As you create variations, ion automatically estimates the duration of your forthcoming experiment based on your traffic volume, expected performance lift and statistical confidence interval.
- Test Anywhere, Anytime—Any page within the platform can include an MVT experiment. Run as many experiments as you like with as many variations in each experiment as you like. You have the freedom to create and test to your heart’s content.
- Optimize Automatically or Manually—If you like to ‘set-it-and-forget’, ion will automatically optimize your MVT experiment using your set level of statistical confidence. Over the course of your experiment, ion will retire variations once their performance reaches statistical confidence. Or can manually retire variations if you prefer. Either way, there’s no code, no help from developers, no math to do, no spreadsheets to crunch. It’s all right there for you to make solid decisions—fast.
Meaningful and Reliable Real-Time Results
ion is a reliable source of highly specialized real-time analytics. It’s geared to deliver actionable pictures of who’s doing what, where and when—to help you make good decisions—fast.
Confidence
We understand the ambiguity that comes from looking at multiple streams of data on the same metrics and seeing disparate results. ion inspires confidence by collecting data as a native part of content & tests. There are no scripts to misfire, no configuration files to get out of sync. It’s reliable, database-level accuracy that comes from the fully integrated platform.
ion also makes it easy to track analytics using third-party solutions like Omniture or Google Analytics. Many of our customers use our internal reporting to guide testing and integrate their third-party solution to gain enterprise-wide visibility.
“Ongoing A/B and MVT landing page testing has doubled TEKsystems’ conversion rate and decreased the cost-per-conversion by more than 50%! Thanks to the new pages and better conversion rate, TEKsystems ended up saving over $100,000 in media spend over the course of a year.”— TEKsystems
Flexible Statistical Confidence Interval
All decision makers don’t share the same risk management approach. ion makes it easy to set how sure you want to be of a test result. Statistical confidence can be set between 80-99% at your discretion. The platform can automatically optimize your tests at your confidence interval or to you can manually manage your tests. In either case, the data that’s used to make decisions is updated in real time, giving you the knowledge you need to backup business-critical choices.
