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Test this, test that…and always be testing.

As I listened to one speaker after the next, I wondered why a client would hire them in the first place. If you are a CRO agency, and the best advice you can provide to attendees in a conference is to test this and test that, then I am not sure why these companies would hire you in the first place.

All you need to do is start AB testing, find that one fantastic test that will take you from absolute anonymity to an overnight web success…that is what brings most …

A conversion optimization project is typically divided into four different phases that intertwine:

Scrutinize stage: You conduct various activities to determine possible testing areas on a platform or campaign Hypothesis: you create a hypothesis for the different testing ideas identified during the scrutinize phase Implement: you validate your hypothesis through the process of AB or usability testing Propagate: you look for insights, share them within the organization, across marketing channels and verticals

As you go through the process of identifying conversion issues on your website (scrutinize), you can easily identify anywhere from 150 to 250 possible test scenarios. Shana Rusonis …

Wild guesses and opinions often only result in delusional outcomes. Though opinions are by far the most widely accepted truth, they rarely are factual. It is a better practice to lean on deductive reasoning and logic instead of guesswork. But how do you arrive at what is labeled as a fact or a valid statement? Experimentation is the key.

Businesses realize the importance of scientific experimentation and testing. Many product-based enterprises have imbibed experimentation in their organizational culture. The reason – innovation cannot result without experimentation. Moreover, though there are millions of ideas that spur every minute, every hour, it …

Bayesian versus Frequentist Statisticians: the war is real

Imagine that you wake up in the one morning and you don’t remember anything from your previous life. You’ve erased all memories from your previous days.

Pretty intense and terrifying, huh?

Well, that’s how Bayesian statisticians describe frequentist colleagues because frequentist statisticians do not use any prior knowledge. Everything you learn about the world is through the lens of events that are happening at the moment and currently.

Michael Hochster explains;

“The essential difference between Bayesian and Frequentist statisticians is in how probability is used.”

As interest grows in conversion optimization and A/B testing, marketers are always searching for a new design that will generate significant uplifts in conversion rates. Because the majority of AB tests fail to produce any meaningful results, many marketers are too eager to declare a winner for a split test.

So, even in the few instances where a testing software declares a winner, there is a good chance that you merely identified a false positive.

How do you avoid that?

You start by having a good handle on A/B testing statistics to ensure that your data is collected and analyzed …

Did you know anywhere from 80% to 90% percent of A/B tests do not produce any significant results?

In fact:

Only 1 out of 8 A/B tests drive significant change.

Done incorrectly, some marketers have begun to question the value of A/B testing…

…their A/B test reports an uplift of 20% and yet, the increase reported by the AB testing software never seems to translate into improvements or profits.

The reason?

“Most winning A/B test results are illusory.” (Source: Qubit)

Furthermore, the majority of arguments that call for running A/A testing consider it a sanity check before you run …

If you missed, we are conducting a Facebook live every Thursday at 12 pm EST.

Last week Ayat spoke about the SHIP method (Scrutinize, Hypothesize, Implement, Propagate). She honed in on the first letter in SHIP, Scrutinize. She summarized what it takes to build out your conversion roadmap so you have a plan for testing and moving forward.

Khalid recently wrote a post on why most case studies suck. Well, it wasn’t actually that case studies that suck, but rather that the AB experiments conducted within these case studies are simply not valid. We also had an interesting discussion about in the Invesp linkedin and the Invesp facebook pages and tweeted about it as well.

The point of this long week debate came down to: process, process, process.

If you follow a sound CRO process and are careful about missteps when it comes to AB testing, you can achieve amazing results and have a successful program.

But for …