Comment by shadowmint

I like this.

See, we've spent the last year doing an Omniture implementation, using T&T, and frankly, its been a waste of money and time.

This isn't a criticism of the T&T tools; its a criticism of our own internal analytics handling and analysis team, and possibly the implementation guidance we received from a few places.

You can guess at generalizations from the A/B/N changes you've made and try them again, but practically speaking? Meh. It seems like the learnings from one page are very hard to transfer to another page.

That's why you don't see posts like "Top ten generalizations about how to make your website better!" instead you pay "SEO Expects" and "Analytics Ninjas" as consultants and they tell you things like "pages with images convert more, generally, but that may not be the case for your specific website because of blah". Handy. Do you have any more generic and obvious advice that doesn't tangibly translate into practical changes to my website?

Here's the thing: Running an A/B is easy, but analyzing the results is really hard. Generating some kind of general analytics rules is very hard.

The reason I like this approach is simple: it's easy. It's easy to implement. It's easy to explain. It's easy to convey to the designers that you're doing a 'throw at the wall and see what sticks' approach to pages. It's easy to explain to managers how why the best page has been picked. You don't need a self important analytics ninja who will go on endlessly about user segments and how if you segment the data differently you can see kittens in the page view statistics.

Just make lots of pages, and see what happens.

It's not perfect, but it's enough to get started~ (...and honestly, that's the most important thing when you're working with analytics; it beats the hell out of a 3 month implementation cycle that ends up with... page views <-- to be fair, personal opinion about uselessness of implementation not presently shared by marketing department, who likes the pretty graphs. Whatever they mean.)