LPO Test Design: Let the Losers Speak
What bores me about The Oscars is the very predictable acceptance speeches. The event would be far more entertaining and educational if they only allowed the losers to speak as well.
“The script was terrible,” we might hear. “The first act created no suspense and by the third act a crackhead would be asleep. The only good acting was by the main character’s dog, and the sound track tried too hard to create suspense and instead sounded so out of place we became aware of how boring the film actually was.”
Similarly, one of the most dangerous traps a marketer can fall into with LPO is disproportionate concern with the winner. If you pay attention to the losers, they’ll tell you what went wrong with them so you can avoid those mistakes as well.
SEM’s look to the winners for page elements or themes that boost performance, while not simultaneously looking to these pages for what may decrease results. This oversight, and many others, can be overcome by a story-line, incremental test plan.
What do I mean by that?
I think of the HBO series, “The Wire”, for which Wikipedia has six notations citing it as the greatest television series of all time, for it’s spectacular long-arch, chaotic yet coherent storyline.
LPO can also sustain an impressive run of valuable tests if the test planner understands the fundamental page elements at play, the messaging and aesthetic themes that may play them out, the precise production requirements to pull it all off, and the end audience’s anticipated processing of all the work.
Incremental knowledge gain is not a hot run on a craps table. A well-designed test plan builds evolutionary paths that are both flexible and coherent.