As a huge fan, and active practitioner of, testing (A/B and multivariate), I decided it was time to record another podcast about the subject. I invited some of the people who I think have done a lot in this area and are working with continuous improvements online.

Some of the topics discussed in this podcast:

• Where should someone new to testing begin?
• Does method matter?
• Is suboptimization a risk?
• Can we trust the statistics behind tools?
• What test result has been the most surprising?

Download the podcast

The panel in this podcast about testing:

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of several best-selling books: Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?, and Always Be Testing. He is also the co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Web Analytics Association. Bryan serves as an advisory board member of several venture capital backed startup companies (such as Bazaarvoice, iPerceptions, UserTesting.com, and ClickEquations) and is on the board of trustees of the Direct Marketing Education Foundation.

Lance Loveday is the founder and CEO of Closed Loop Marketing. His company has become highly sought after, serving a wide array of clients—from startups to big brands such as Hewlett-Packard, Brocade, and Lockheed Martin. Lance is co-author of the book Web Design for ROI.

Anne Holland is the publisher of WhichTestWon? and president of Anne Holland Ventures Inc, an online business media company. She is the founder and former president of MarketingSherpa, and has for more than 20 years been conducting tests and research into what works best in marketing.

Chris Goward is the CEO of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization and an expert in website conversion rate optimization. Chris has been optimizing online and offline marketing for companies such as eBay, Epson, SAP, Getty Images, BabyAge.com, Rudder.com, Outrigger Hotels, and Google.

I had the chance to ask Eric Siegel, the conference chair for Predictive Analytics World, a few questions. The conference is being held in San Francisco in February.

Why do you think there is a need for a conference only dedicated to predictive analytics?

Eric: No matter how you use predictive analytics, the story is the same: Predictive scoring of customers optimizes business performance. Because of this, predictive analytics initiatives across industries leverage the same core predictive modeling technology, share similar project overhead and data requirements, and face common process challenges and analytical hurdles.

There’s plenty of activity out there to cover. The conference program is booked with over 25 speakers presenting case study after case study, from companies such as Amazon, 3M, Charles Schwab, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Netflix and more.

What is your definition of predictive analytics?

Eric: Predictive analytics is business intelligence technology that produces a predictive score for each customer or prospect. Assigning these predictive scores is the job of a predictive model which has, in turn, been trained over your data, learning from the experience of your organization.

For more information, see our Predictive Analytics Guide.

What’s Jim Sterne’s involvement in the conference?

Eric: Jim Sterne is serving as a priceless adviser helping us steer the kickoff of Predictive Analytics World. In fact, PAW is run by the same killer team behind Jim’s eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, headed by Show Director Matthew Finlay.

Who’s Prediction Impact?

Eric: Prediction Impact is my consultancy, offering services and training in predictive analytics.

Lennart Svanberg and yours truly took Internet Marketing Conference (IMC) to New York City this week. We had a lot of fun and really enjoyed all the excellent presentations.

IMC New York is the smallest, and most experimental, of our IMC events. The focus for IMC New York 2008 (and IMC New York 2007, for that matter) was on everything relating to mobile marketing. Since mobile Internet is still in its infancy, this is still a fairly small niche conference.

IMC was part of Internet Week New York.

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