Taguchi Testing

Taguchi testing is a way of taking some of the pain out of marketing testing.

If you've done any marketing or read any marketing books or listened to marketing seminars you know that testing is the key to successful marketing. Testing one headline against another, one price against another price, etc.

If you've done any testing you know it's a major pain in the neck. It takes time and costs money. Whether it's a sales letter you mail, an email sales letter, a web site sales page or a magazine ad, everything needs to be tested. You can literally spend thousands of dollars running a single test, pitting one headline against another. And then thousands of dollars more testing sub-headlines and thousands more testing prices.

That was in the days of A/B testing. Test one variable against another. We'll talk more about that in a moment. First...

Dr Taguchi is a Japanese mathematician that created a technology that enabled Japan to dramatically improve the quality of their products in a very short time. They were able to do this because they could test a number of variables of their product simultaneously and determine which of the variables were important and what values of the variables produced the best result. We're all familiar with the quality of Japanese autos and other products.

Not long ago a Dr Jim Kowalick adapted Taguchi testing to advertising. He created the methodology that allows you and me to test multiple variables in our sales messages simultaneously so we can do more testing in substantially less time at dramatically less cost.

With the standard method developed by Dr Kowalick, eighteen different sales pages are created to test the multiple variables. There are 15 different arrays available the give you many testing options.

For example, you can test 6 different headlines along with 3 different pre-headlines and 3 different sub-headlines, and three different opening paragraphs, and 3 different prices, and 3 different body fonts (this can make a difference), and 3 different headline fonts (this can make a difference).

As as side note, I tested fonts in a sales letter and found that verdana font in the headline got substantially better results than a Times Roman font headline. Who'd of thunk?

There is quite a mix and match of the number of factors and the number of variables per factor.

I've seen very improved results from Taguchi testing and I've seen reports of 300%-400% improvements in sales letters and other advertising campaigns.

We have developed several tools to help you get the most out of Taguchi testing with the least pain. In the Ad Tracking menu we have included tools that will help you define what Factors you want to test and the variable information that is to be associated with each of the Factors. We save your information so you can review it at any time.

You'll also find a presentation of the "recipes" that are to be used to create each of the pages. With these recipes you'll know which variable of each Factor is going to appear one each of the 18 pages. With the recipes you can build your own pages for testing.

By the way, the ad tracker you find in eCOMpal let's you enter the address (URL) of each of your pages and it will automatically present each page in round robin fashion. It also tracks the number of clicks received for each page and records the number of sales and abandoned shopping carts. This makes it easy for you to gather the statistics for your campaign.

Another incredible time saver is our page generator. You can upload your sales page, identify where you want each factor displayed. After you've identified the location of the factors, you can automatically generate all 18 pages a the click of a button saving you hours of work.

You can get a free download of Dr Kowalick's Taguchi Testing sSreadsheet.

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