Multivariate Testing

This type of testing requires more traffic to reach your testing goals. For this reason, it is more suited for large companies or websites with a lot of traffic in terms of daily users.

One advantage of multivariate testing, however, is that it can save time, effort, and money compared to other forms of testing. You only have to design the core of your product once and make a few variations to get started.

How do you do a multivariate test?

To do a multivariate test, you first have to determine the variables that you want to test. Here's a list of examples that you could use for your test.

• The size or color of your main call-to-action button.

• The copy of your headers.

• Positioning of elements.

Once you've picked the elements you want to test, you have to create your design variations. For a multivariate test, you test every possible combination of variables. So more variables mean more tests! You can see that in the table below.

This table shows how the number of multivariate tests grow as the number of variations grow.

Variations	Elements	Tests
2	2	4
3	2	8
4	2	16

Testing the variations works just as an A/B test. You take a few days for each variation to be live and compare the results afterward.

Multivariate testing vs. A/B testing

The concept behind multivariate testing is the same as for A/B testing. You design and test a variation of your design to see which one works best according to a business metric you specify.

The only difference is that you are testing multiple versions of the same page rather than just two. Also, unlike A/B testing, multivariate testing allows you to test multiple variables at once.

For example, if you'd A/B test your landing page, you would test the call-to-action color first and then change the header size. Using multivariate testing, you can try these variables at once by creating multiple variations of all variable combinations.

Useful resources

Multivariate Testing for UX Design - Adobe

Multivariate vs. A/B Testing - NN Group