10 Tactics for Online Testing

Meanwhile, the online world is beginning to offer an exciting new opportunity: automated test robots. Automated testing may not yet be supported by your e-commerce platform or any of your advertising partners. But within 12 months, they will.

Here’s how automated testing works: You load up a set of different marketing messages (e.g., ads on an advertising network, featured products on your homepage) and instruct the platform as to which metric you want to optimize (e.g., clickthrough rate, clicks, sales). The platform then rotates through the set of messages, tracking which performs best. As the platform learns what message performs best, it preferentially serves the winner, improving your results.