Finally, here it is: the video of my “The Art of Ignoring” presentation at the Software Industry Conference in Boston.
Download the slides and full text of this presentation in PDF format here.
The player will show in this paragraph
Enjoy!
AlwinHoogerdijk.com
Software Marketing Blog
Great presentation, thanks Alwin!
Good presentation. Liked it.
BTW: How do you do split A/B testing? What scripts/software do you use for it?
We have built our own system for split testing. I am planning to write an article about it some day, but here’s the basics:
When a visitor first visits our website, he gets assigned in the A or B category randomly. I store this in a visitor table (MySQL). Then I drop a cookie on the user’s computer with the VisitorID (the ID of the visitor record) and some other info (IP address, referrer, Agent, etc…).
Each subsequent pageview, the assigned category is retrieved and the A or B version of my website is shown.
Now when the user downloads or buys, I track the Visitor ID (and thus the category) into my customer database, which lets me runs stats of the number of downloads and sales in each of the categories.
When I start a new A/B test, I just reset all Categories in my visitor table to “X”, so that the new test only tracks new visitors.
Hope that helps.
I wanted to write similar scripts, but to tell the truth was lazy to finish it. I’m currently using Google Website Optimizer for this purpose:
https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/ — it is pretty nice service
Chester
Alwin, I enjoyed the presentation, thanks for posting it. For a one-man ISV, would you expect the product, conversion, visitor iteration to be daily, weekly, monthly? I usually put my marketing hat on in the morning and then my developer hat on in the evening, maybe it makes sense for me to spend longer periods focusing on each stage. I would be curious to hear your suggestions.
Hi Mo,
Good question, I have had more people ask the same question. I will try to squeeze more info on that in my presentation at the ESWC.
I general, I am not a big fan of a fixed development vs marketing time distribution. I would suggest to do iteration cycles of at least of a couple of weeks. This allows you to really dig in and focus.
But more importantly, you should focus on the area (product, conversion or traffic) where you can reach the largest increase in profits. And keep working on it until you reached it.
For example, if you are doing 4 sales per day out of 400 daily visitors, you obviously need more traffic. With traffic that low, improving your product or website isn’t going to bring you a big jump in sales.
On the other hand, if you have a qualitly product, get lots of laser-targeted traffic through SEO and Adwords and still don’t sell a lot of copies… then you need to take a serious look at your conversion tactics.