We, in general, do not appreciate those out-of-nowhere troublemakers who are crying “I’ve been there first”. Whenever news breaks out about a patent infringement suite from an unknown company against an industry leader seeking untold riches in damages, the first idea that comes to our mind is “O, boy, another vulture”.
But try to look at the other side of the story, at someone’s feeling, the one’s who did in fact invent something but never patented it or even put real efforts to bring it to fruition. He might thought “I am sure someone else has done it before – I can’t be the smartest in the world - If nobody did it until now, it might not be that great idea after all”. Or any of many other explanations just to keep status quo. And a few years later to read about a phenomenal success story of ACME Corporation (or John Doe) that “got that crazy idea” and made that ingenious new gadget that nobody would even think about a few year ago.
But enough said. The story of multi-variate landing page optimization (LPO) is one of smaller opportunities “I’ve-done-that-N-years-ago –I-was-there-first!” I will not talk about the larger opportunities I’ve missed in my life – you will not believe me anyway.
So, without further ado, let’s rewind back the clock to 1998. The Internet craze was going out of control, sign on bonuses for startups were so ridiculous that everyone felt they were from another planet (perhaps because I did not get any?)
Software and hardware had finally reached the level that made creating dynamic web pages easy and displaying them in a sequence fast enough that the users did not to feel they could have a cup of coffee between the screens. After many years of successfully using conjoint analysis (a form of multivariate testing) on desktops around the world including with graphical variables, we had started working on a Web version of Ideamap, our flagship software. While the software was still in beta, suddenly we got a call from Copenhagen, from one of the longest standing licensees of Ideamap, Lene Hansen (GfK Denmark). Lego, a client of hers, was attempting to improve their website to make it stickier to the visitors. And Lene got the idea – could Ideamap be utilized to answer Lego’s question regarding the research-based Website optimization?
Although our Danish colleagues had not known yet precisely what they were searching for to make the website better, they had realized the need to use advanced customer research to achieve that goal. This was an incredibly critical thinking and a break-through – Lene’s and Lego’s realization that WebPages could be treated the same way as printed copy and optimized based on the consumer research. The rest was easy.
For us it was just another application of the approach we used for package optimization (dynamic graphical overlays based on an experimental design and a predefined template). It just has to be done online. In a few days I put online a demo (see picture below) utilizing a brand new Visual Basic functionality for web applications that allowed for systematic variation of the elements of the front page and presentation them in a sequence to respondents for their rating.
I arrived to Copenhagen on a cold gloomy day right after the New Year of 1999. The cultural experience of that city, from the colorful plums of the nobility and officers visiting the royal palace reception to the infamous Friday nights (it’s a kind of ‘happy hours’ on steroids that extends to early Saturday morning without the restrictions imposed by lack of a designated driver) deserves a separate story.
The next day we were in the airport quite early with Lene to catch our flight to Bellund, the headquarters of Lego. The only formality to get onboard was showing your ticket (no ID, metal detector or X-ray were needed to get to the jet for the 20 minutes flight).
Something was telling me (was it my lavish Danish breakfast?) that the 737 was not specifically designed to fly such short distances and at such low altitudes. I was very glad to land in what once was Lego corporate airport but later donated to the city.
Two Lego employees met us at the gate and whisked the small Opel to the sprawling campus nearby. We were a few minute late and the meeting was already running. Nobody seemed to notice or at least acknowledge our quiet entrance through the side door, and the meeting continued without hiccup. The only change was that the presenter switched to flawless English halfway thorough a phrase and the remainder of the meeting was as if I had never left New York (except for my heavy accent, which was the only noticeable one in the room).
It was the first (at least, as far as we know it now) case of using conjoint analysis approach for LPO. My search and interviews of industry leaders did not yield other contenders for the title yet.
Unfortunately, we have never really capitalized on that early experience. We were swamped with a multitude of ideas waiting to be implemented – multivariate video ad optimization, an ‘innovation machine’, establishing new science Mind Genomics, applying our approach to presidential elections, public policies, stock markets, etc... And so LPO remained in the virtually exclusive domain of web designers and webmasters.
A few years later several startups jumped on the idea, but it still lingered as a novelty until recently when Google marked this approach as mainstream by entering the field with its Google Optimizer.
So, who in fact deserves the credit for multivariate LPO? Is it the first inventors that did it mostly unbeknownst to the world? Or is it those startups that made it available to the public albeit on a very limited basis? I vote for Google – they made it readily available to everybody!
Good job, guys!
Alex Gofman
Figure 1. Two sample screens from the demo project with Lego.
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