SiteSpect Does Web Tests without Tags

I had a long and interesting talk yesterday with Larry Epstein at SiteSpect, a vendor of Web site multivariate testing and targeting software. SiteSpect’s primary claim to fame is they manage such tests without inserting any page tags, unlike pretty much all other vendors in this space. Their trick, as I understand it, is to use a proxy server that inserts test changes and captures results between site visitors and a client’s Web server. Users control changes by defining conditions, such as words or values to replace in specified pages, which the system checks for as traffic streams by.

Even though defining complex changes can take a fair amount of technical expertise, users with appropriate skills can make it happen without modifying the underlying pages. This frees marketers from reliance on the technical team that manages the site. It also frees the process from Javascript (which is inside most page tags), which doesn’t always execute correctly and adds some time to page processing.

This is an intriguing approach, but I haven’t decided what I think of it. Tagging individual pages or even specific regions within each page is clearly work, but it’s by far the most widely used approach. This might mean that most users find it acceptable or it might be the reason relatively few people use such systems. (Or both.) There is also an argument that requiring tags on every page means you get incomplete results when someone occasionally leaves one out by mistake. But I think this applies more to site analytics than testing. With testing, the number of tags is limited and they should be inserted with surgical precision. Therefore, inadvertent error should not be an issue and the technical people should simply do the insertions as part of their job.

I’m kidding, of course. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of working with marketing systems, it’s that marketers never want to rely on technical people for anything—and the technical people heartily agree that marketers should do as much as possible for themselves. There are very sound, practical reasons for this that boil down to the time and effort required to accurately transfer requests from marketers to technologists. If the marketers can do the work themselves, these very substantial costs can be avoided.

This holds true even when significant technical skills are still required. Setting up complex marketing campaigns, for example, can be almost as much work in campaign management software as when programmers had to do it. Most companies with such software therefore end up with experts in their marketing departments to do the setup. The difference between programmers and these campaign management super users isn’t really so much their level of technical skill, as it is that the super users are part of the marketing department. This makes them both more familiar with marketers’ needs and more responsive to their requests.

Framing the issue this way puts SiteSpect’s case in a different light. Does SiteSpect really give marketers more control over testing and segmentation than other products? Compared with products where vendor professional services staff sets up the tests, the answer is yes. (Although relying on vendor staff may be more like relying on an internal super user than a corporate IT department.) But most of the testing products do provide marketing users with substantial capabilities once the initial tagging is complete. So I’d say the practical advantage for SiteSpect is relatively small.

But I’ll give the last word to SiteSpect. Larry told me they have picked up large new clients specifically because those companies did find working with tag-based testing systems too cumbersome. So perhaps there are advantages I haven’t seen, or perhaps there are particular situations where SiteSpect’s no-tag approach has special advantages.

Time, and marketing skills, will tell.