When optimising your website, ad copy or any marketing tool, the most important data to analyse comes from your traffic. But before it’s been optimised, your site might not receive the required number of visitors to gain statistically significant insights. And that’s where our longitudinal testing comes into play, to help deliver those game-changing results and take your site to the next level.
We designed longitudinal testing to overcome such concerns, to bring you valuable insights and make analyses of the data available. All to keep your focus on achieving your goals.
What is Longitudinal Testing?
Longitudinal testing is a long-term experiment carried out using the traffic to your website over a period of time. A/B tests and multivariate testing (MVT) both work by splitting the traffic to your site across several variants that run simultaneously. Longitudinal testing makes changes to your site without splitting the traffic.
Across a span of three months, we use similar techniques to A/B and MVT to gather information about changes made to your webpages. We make one or several changes to your site, then we collect data on your visitors for three months. When this is complete, we then compare that data with the previous three months’ worth (before we made the change) to see if the change had a positive or negative impact, or no impact at all.
Longitudinal testing isn’t suitable for all websites, but can be highly effective at gleaning information from limited traffic numbers. Though it takes longer, the data we collect is still incredibly valuable for fully optimising your site.
Why Longitudinal Tests are Essential
Small businesses and start-ups often find that in the early stages of development, their websites get little to no traffic.
In these cases, traditional methods of A/B and multivariate testing can be problematic. This is because they gather data by splitting your traffic stream across variables that have been changed on your site. With little to no visitors, it’s almost impossible to have statistically significant findings that can reliably inform your website changes.
Instead, longitudinal testing collects visitor data over a prolonged period until a set number of visitors have clicked onto your site. This enables you to achieve the kind of essential user data necessary to optimise your website for maximum profitability, no matter how new your site is.
Why Use Pivotal?
Collecting traffic data over a set period of time is a complex and time-consuming task.
Our team of experts are experienced in running longitudinal testing. As such, we have the required knowledge to understand exactly how to prepare for, run and complete the process for maximum effectiveness.
We will:
- Research your current website and analyse the available data to set appropriate goals where there is room for improvement
- Identify the best changes to make in order to monitor changes
- Develop hypotheses with your business goals in mind, making predictions about which changes will generate positive results for your website
- Create variants and implement the required changes to gather the appropriate data. This happens over a set period of time or until we have met the required traffic levels
- Analyse the collected data and compare it to the previous set period. This helps us identify significant differences
“Great bunch to work with.”
Tom Hayden Director – Delocate Ltd