What Is Multivariate Testing? What You Should Know About MVT

After all the work you have put in, not getting traffic to your website can be very frustrating. Luckily, there are options to test the changes you made to your website and their effects on the conversion rate or traffic overall. One such methods is multivariate testing. If you are new to all of this, you might be wondering: what is multivariate testing?

Which one of these methods is the best way to test the changes on your website? What are other methods of testing? To get the answer to all these questions, keep on reading until the end!

What Is Multivariate Testing?

A multivariate test is one that runs numerous combinations of different variables at once. We want to see, out of all the potential combinations, which has the greatest influence on the tracked indicators. To see which one, many elements must be modified simultaneously on the same page.

The conventional scientific idea is in opposition to multivariate testing. We can sum it up as performing several A/B tests simultaneously on the same page.

A server is set up to provide different iterations of your website to traffic in real-time. It’s up to you how many variations of your website are made available.

The sole factor to take into account when deciding how many variations to test is your capacity for interpreting the findings you’re requesting.

Keep track of the conversion rate and goals for each setup after the right period of time is up. If a marketer lacks this expertise, they can outsource testing and data recovery to a variety of businesses.

Differences Between A/B Testing

What is the difference between A/B testing and multivariate testing? Let’s take a look at the methodology, common uses, advantages, and limitations of these testing methods.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is known as split testing. We use it for website optimization. We look at the conversion rates of two different iterations of a page, version A and version B, then contrast them using real traffic. Visitors to the website are categorized into one of the two versions. In many ways, we’re testing a hypothesis.

You can figure out which version of the page is most successful by monitoring how visitors engage with the content they are presented. This can be the videos they view, the buttons they click, or whether or not they subscribe to a newsletter.

The least complicated approach to reviewing a page design is A/B testing, which can be helpful in a variety of circumstances.

Advantages of A/B Testing

The most obvious advantage is this test’s simplicity and how fast you can conduct it. Compared to multivariate testing, or MVT, A/B testing can give you results incredibly quickly.

It’s a lot simpler, so if you don’t need to see the effects of a specific number of changes, this can help a lot. Say you are thinking of doing a complete overhaul of your landing page, as an example. In this example, you wouldn’t need to test for all the variables (image, CTA, fonts, etc.) one by one. You can analyze the different versions of your landing page compared to the old one and be done with it.

Again, you can test for the overall number of visitors (which we call traffic) or conversion rate. Conversion rate is the rate of visitors that did the thing you were expecting them to do. If you are in e-commerce, it can mean the number of visitors who bought something after clicking on your site. You can test for an image of a product, as an example. The probabilities are endless. In the end, you are going to decide which factor you are going to test.

The simplicity of this test is also its weakness, however. If you are going to test multiple variables at the same time, you are going to need to look at multivariate testing.

Advantages of Multivariate Testing (MVT)

You can dive down and determine precisely which combination of your key website components produces the greatest results using multivariate testing. Compared to an A/B test, the changes in a multivariate test are more subtle. However, it provides you with insight into how important factors might combine to significantly increase your conversion rates.

When you want to improve your landing pages, the home page, or other important pages without having to redesign them, we can use multivariate testing.

Additionally, multivariate testing saves you hours or days since you may test several variables at once rather than one by one. Additionally, you get to see how each variable affects your overall objective and how it interacts with the others.

These variables can be the content of your text, the font of the text, images, headers, CTA, and all sorts of other elements.

The advantages of A/B testing are the disadvantages of multivariate testing, however. The thing that is the most different is the time.

Depending on how different elements you are going to test, you will need more time to achieve statistically significant results that have a high impact.

You are obviously going to need more time and traffic from your visitors to see what is different between four or five variables. On the other hand, with the A/B testing, you have to do it twice.

In Conclusion

What is multivariate testing? What is A/B testing? We hope you now have a clear answer to these questions after reading this post.

When it comes to testing your website design and content for optimization, there is no correct answer that applies everywhere. There is a “one size fits all” method, unfortunately.

Some changes you have made can increase traffic but not conversion. Some may even decrease traffic.

If you are working with multiple different elements but not a total redesign, the multivariate test is the right answer for you.