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Conduct Web experiments using PHP, Part 1

By Paul Meagher
2005-03-16

A question of design
You can use factorial designs to measure the effectiveness of one or more components of Web offers. You'll begin by trying to measure the effectiveness of the ad banner component of a sample Web offer.

In this sample, the ad banner is a 200- by 400-pixel ad appearing on the right-hand side of all your site pages. The ad includes an offer to join your mailing list. You'd like to determine which version of the banner generates the most mailing-list sign ups.

A marketing hypothesis is that you will get more responses by using an image of a person versus an image of the product in the ad banner. Another hypothesis is that you will get more responses by using longer sell text versus short sell text (for instance, just the product byline) in the banner.

The hypotheses suggest two corresponding factors you should manipulate (and presents you with a 2 by 2 matrix):

• An image factor with two levels: Product, Person
• A text factor with two levels: Short, Long


In a full factorial design, all possible factor-level combinations are presented equally often during the course of the experiment. In this Web offer effectiveness study, you have four possible combinations of image and text factors: product-short, product-long, person-short, and person-long. The end result is that for each factor-level combination, you have the same number of opportunities to measure whether a response occurred or not.



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First published by IBM developerWorks
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