Sponsored Content WEBINAR: ELECTION 2008: E-mail Tips from a Political Insider   WEBINAR: Becoming the Illusionist: The Magic of Using "Brand" to Drive Response without Results Disappearing in the Process   WEBINAR: Score and Win Through Cooperation   TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Holiday's are prime-time for email marketing - maximize your ROI by getting to the inbox   ON DEMAND WEBINAR--MASTER CLASS: High Performance Online and Off-line Strategies for Large Scale Customer Acquisition   FREE WHITE PAPER - Direct Mail and the Internet Find any supplier you need - agencies, CRM, fulfillment, lists, e-commerce, paper, printers, telemarketing, and more. Featured Categories Lists and Data Telemarketing Database Marketing E-commerce Web Marketing Agency & Creative Services Print, Production & Paper Lists and Data Processing :: view all categories Get free access to more than 50,000 list data cards - one of the most comprehensive databases in the industry. >> Search Now DIRECT Buzz Blog Webinars Buyer's Guide Calculators JobZone ListFinder Promo Calendar Research Store E-Newsletters Print Magazine This Month in Direct Magazine Deal With It Direct had a full house for this year's list roundtable. Considering all the additional responsibilities on brokers' plates, that's impressive... See Full July Issue

Everyone agrees that continuous testing is required to make sure that a Web site is performing up to its highest potential. Smart Web operators want to live in a state of almost perpetual tweak, rearranging elements on their home page, revising text, swapping out images and re-cutting their sizes, or even just changing the color of buttons to make them more visible or inviting.

But whether A/B testing or multivariate, that kind of ongoing evolution can play hob with a site’s organic search engine ranking if it’s done simultaneously. And while the impact of testing on search can be lessened if it’s done serially—that is, testing one version and then switching over to test another—how you manage to run an accurate test if your site contains lots of dynamic copy? In such a case, you can’t be sure that you’re comparing like to like and therefore can’t be confident of either your testing outcomes or your conclusions.

Vegas.com, which bills itself (thanks to stats from Media Metrix) as “the most-visited city travel site on the Web”, was faced with those twin problems in testing the effectiveness of its Web presence. In fact, Vegas.com and another site, LasVegas.com, are owned and operated by the Greenspun family of companies, a privately-owned Nevada media company; and those two sites combined refer 65% of the Vegas-bound traffic at the major online travel agencies Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity, according to Bryan Allison, vice president of marketing for Vegas.com.

“Between the two Web sites, we get about 2.5 million unique visitors a month,” he says. Those visitors come looking for pretty comprehensive listings of the shows being offered that day, week or month in Las Vegas, along with services such as air fare deals, golf course tee times, hotel reservations, spa offers and area tours. The Greenspun holdings also take in not only one of the city’s two newspapers, the Las Vegas Sun, but also a number of specialty magazines and an in-room guide. As a result, content on both Web sites is in an almost constant state of turnover.

That made Web testing the sites a difficult problem, says Todd Martin, product manager for Vegas.com—particularly since the company was using a manual test process run in-house.

Vegas.com found its solution in the testing platform offered by SiteSpect Inc., which allows users to make changes to a site’s content, navigation and merchandising without having to change the underlying site code.

“We allow operators to get a test up and running quickly—literally in a couple of hours in many cases—and to run multiple tests concurrently on an ongoing basis,” says Eric Hansen, president of Boston-based SiteSpect. “The tools are no longer the limiting factor; now the only limit is the ability to put into action what users have learned through their testing.”

SiteSpect users start with wizards that help them create variations to be tested by suggesting how elements such as headlines, promotions, pricing, navigation and layout can affect conversion rates. Clients set up the content variations and, if they wish, segment the customer categories to be tested upon; then, as visitors click through onto the site, SiteSpect retrieves content and inserts the elements into the stream as it comes from the server, in a way that’s seamless to the visitor. SiteSpect also offers the chance to track user behavior over a series of subsequent visits using first-party cookies.

The ability to institute Web site tests quickly was particularly valuable to Vegas.com, Martin says. “The quickest test I’ve run [with the SiteSpect platform] probably took five minutes from concept to execution,” he says. “That speed is sometimes important for us, particularly in merchandising where special deals came come up out of the blue from our providers. The changes can be made on the fly, and with real-time reporting we can see how those changes affect the user experience within the first hour.”

As for the effect on human resources, Martin says that under Vegas.com’s former in-house system, simply testing a change in the color of the buttons used on the site used to be a time-consuming effort for three people. “You would have needed content involvement, development involvement and user-interface involvement to get that launched. With the application that SiteSpect provides, it’s all dynamically generated and done by one person in five minutes.”

When it comes down to deciding what to test, Martin says, the fact that they can now run multiple variants easily means Vegas.com doesn’t have to prioritize its testing aims. “Priority is simply overall optimization of the site,” he says. “Right now we can be running a test for our merchandising at the same time that we’re running another one for site optimization.”

The Vegas.com folks hold their cards close when it comes to speaking specifically about the impact of SiteSpect’s testing/ optimization platform on their site conversions, but Allison will admit to seeing “three-digit percentage increases” in some key metrics.

“It’s good stuff,” he says. “We’re definitely seeing the value.” SiteSpect testing has already been added to the LasVegas.com site, and Allison says the future will probably see the platform rolled out to some of the other Greenspun content holdings as well.