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AB and multivariate testing

Often site owners and marketers reviewing the effectiveness of a site will disagree and the 

only method to be certain of the  best-  performing design or creative alternatives is through 

designing and running experiments to evaluate the best to use. Matt Round, then director 

of personalisation at Amazon, speaking at the E-metrics summit in 2004, said the Amazon 

philosophy, described further in Case study 12.1, is:

Data trumps intuition.

AB testing and multivariate testing are two measurement techniques that can be used to 

review design effectiveness to improve results.

AB testing

In its simplest form,