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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 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 …

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I have meant to write this post for a long time. There has been a lot written about one-tailed vs. two-tailed tests. However, most of the articles approach the topic from a purely statistical perspective providing many formulas but do not show how to do the calculations. Others articles approach the issue from a high-level business perspective. So, here is my attempt to delve deep into the topic. Some sections in this article are heavy on stats and formulas. If you are not interested in these, you can skip them! Special thanks to our data sciences team …

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The quality of insights that you can expect to glean from clickstream data is directly dependent upon the quality of meta-data that you can attach to visitor sessions taking place on your digital platforms.

Visits, page views, bounce rates, cart abandonment etc. are all great metrics but their utility wanes when it comes to their ability to provide any actionable intelligence about advanced efficiency metrics (attribution, channel ROI etc.) and effectiveness metrics (think strategic business outcomes like market share, category growth etc.).

Advanced metrics inevitably require combining data from various sources and businesses to make …

Gif source: by Jason Casteel

Prof Sheen Iyengar of Colombia University is one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of humans when it comes a choice.

She conducted experiments early in her tenure that was groundbreaking. She set up a tasting table at a grocery store offering visitors a taste from an assortment of 24 different jams. 60% of the shoppers stopped by and took a taste. But then she set up a table with just 6 flavors. A lesser amount of 40% of shoppers stopped by and took a taste.

But the kicker was that 30% of …

There are hundreds of case studies and examples on AB testing, explaining what makes it highly useful for conversion optimization. While AB testing is important, it is a mere component of the overall CRO process. What’s critical to keep in mind is not dive into AB testing right away until you know everything about interpreting, analyzing, and understanding test results.

AB testing isn’t foolproof and like anything in statistics, results can simply be wrong. But the more you know about what makes a test valid, and basic statistical concepts, the more likely it is that you will not face …

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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 …