Image Source: Wikipedia

Humans are flawed creatures. We conform to a number of biases outlined by the world’s greatest psychologist. Wikipedia has listed 180 biases that impact our everyday decisions.

This in turn makes our jobs as marketers and optimizers quite tricky. According to social scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, you can’t quite overcome your biases. You’ll always fall into them. Tversky died in 1996 and Kahneman went on to win the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the both of the men did together. His work was summarized in the highly acclaimed and 2011 best …

I still recall the early days of running conversion optimization projects. Clients would come in with horrible websites, outdated designs, and never had paid any attention to usability.

You make a few fixes and test them against the control. And BAM! You have an amazing increase in conversions.

For most websites, long gone are these days.

Sites are well designed. Most good designers understand fundamental usability principals. Most websites have the basics covered.

The good news is that we can now focus on more pressing conversion issues. The bad news is that it takes significantly longer to …

There are more than a billion websites and more are spawning every day. The objective of the majority of these is to attract, engage, convert, and retain visitors. Sadly, most fail. The reason is simple – they don’t take design functionality and design aesthetics seriously. The Co-Founder and CMO of Imaginovation, Michael Georgiou says:

“Users grant websites a fraction of that time: less than eight seconds. Those first impressions are about 94 percent design-related. What’s more, about 75 percent of users will judge your brand credibility based on your website design.”

Everyone knows how important making a first impression is. This is …

Image Source: Nick Veasey

Sometimes, CRO gets you in a rut and you simply need inspiration. And what best way to attain that inspiration than through actual implementations done on other sites? But where to look, who to look at, and how to get that information? Well, we’ve carried the brunt of the work for you! We conducted research on over 500 SAAS and e-commerce sites to come up with some great resources for you. These will be a series of very exciting articles reviewing various pages on the sites and drawing inspiration and information for you.

The …

Any experiment that involves later statistical inference requires a sample size calculation done BEFORE such an experiment starts. A/B testing is no exception. Calculating the minimum number of visitors required for an AB test prior to starting prevents us from running the test for a smaller sample size, thus having an “underpowered” test.

My first experience as a speaker and attendee at the INBOUND18 conference was great. I was taken aback by all the glitz and glamour of such a large show. The lineup of keynotes and spotlight speakers was exciting with names like Beth Comstock, Shonda Rhimes, Reid Hoffman, Deepak Chopra, 2DopeQueens, and A-Rod (no J-Lo did not make a surprise appearance).

I will take you back to 2007 to one of the very first CRO projects we conducted for a large online retailer. The website received a massive amount of traffic (100k per day). Since it was one of our first projects, and the team was a bit trigger happy with AB testing, our first test included 30 different designs to run against the control. The headache of implementing all of these designs was overwhelming. None the less, we launched the test after about six weeks of implementation.

Seven of our challengers beat the original design within five days. The team …

Both user testing and a/b testing are important techniques used during conversion optimization. They aren’t poles apart as far as their purpose is concerned. You can say that they are indeed two sides of the same coin.

The ultimate purpose of user testing and a/b testing is to improve the overall on-site experience for users and to improve the conversion rates of websites. However, one must understand the 8 differences between the two and decide when to pick the right test based on its objective. So, let’s find out what is the purpose of each of these tests.