Your perspective on website optimization is likely shaped by previous experiences with clunky platforms—technology that requires hours of coding and involvement from practically an army of people just to launch a simple test. The expensive, resource-intensive process might even have led you to question whether the results were worth all that effort.

I remember the first time I tried to launch a multivariate test on a website. First, I had to decide what to test. Second, I had to code all the variations, which took forever. And then I had to wait for results that never came because I had decided to test too many variations, each of which had too little impact because my site didn’t receive enough traffic. In the end, it was a wash.

Actually, I don’t think that captures it: I had wasted a lot of time, opportunity cost had taken its toll, and in the end, the idea of running any more tests turned me off completely. Testing, I decided, didn’t make sense yet. Testing platforms just had too many limitations.

Your website testing platform should allow you to run sophisticated, highly targeted tests without asking the IT department to help make it happen. This is possible by working in what’s called the Document Object Model (DOM). Essentially, the DOM is a “layer” that sits between your website and the visitor. The DOM is flexible and easy to control, which allows you to deploy sophisticated features—not just testing, but geotargeting, rendering dynamic graphics and more—without waiting for IT to fit you in.

Now that this new level of autonomy is coupled with data-driven campaign management, marketers no longer have to hurdle platform limitations in order to improve their website marketing performance.