Day 23: Incubator – Testing, An Introduction

November 8, 2009 · Posted in 90 Days of StomperNet, Diary: StomperNet Incubator

Testing Day 23 finds me writing this review on the StomperNet Incubator video lesson on Testing. This is a tough lesson because I find that I will not be able to apply most of the tips from this one immediately. However, it is good to know that this video will always be here waiting for me when I do get to the point where I need to do the different kinds of testing discussed in this video.

First of all, the presenter is no pushover. His name is Andy Edmonds. He is the former Head of Analytics for Live Search at Microsoft. He is also a cognitive psychologist so this got me glued to the screen to listen to what he has to teach me.

Andy starts by stating some terms for Testing. Then he identifies what Testing is NOT. It is not simply a Time-Series. He gives an example of what he means and explains why this is hard to consider as good Testing for our interests. Next he explains the essence of Testing. Here he lists down what needs to be involved in Testing and forewarns you that if you follow this kind of testing, you will find that the results will surprise you as they are not always what you expected.

Andy proceeds to introduce some more Testing terminologies. The words below were defined as they would be used in Testing:

Control
Experiment
Baseline
Variant
Factors
Condition
Null Effect
Power

He ends this series of definitions by emphasizing how important it would be to make yourself get used to Testing so that it becomes part of your practice.

Andy then starts a new section in the video by giving you the rule of thumb on when to start applying Testing based on your Traffic and Conversion Rates. Next he lists down 4 preferred Testing Tools & Methods and describes each briefly.

The part I like best comes next. He shows you how to setup simple testing with Adwords. How detailed was it? He showed on video what options to choose from and explained why. It will cost money though as it involves Adwords. But what he was talking about made more sense because he showed the steps on how to do it.

Next he explains how to evaluate the results you get from the simple testing described in the previous paragraph. He went into some more detail on the other Tools and Methods but none were as detailed as the first one. One thing I found out though is that you have to have someone well versed with Javascript to make your implementation of Testing Methods less of a headache.

Andy ends the video by giving examples of Testing Methods that may hurt your SEO more than it helps. Such Testing methods interfere or confuse the Search Engine spiders indexing you web pages.

All in all a good intro video. The only setback is that I had a hard time following the presentation with the way the presenter speaks. I think this is due to English not being my first language. This is because my classmates say, they did not have trouble at all in following the presentation.

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