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Why small tweaks and split testing don't work, and what to do instead
- anotheryou 8y agoSo basically: Be bold to break out of or to stop wasting your time on tiny local maxima. Further: Use reason to make leaps in the right direction.
- aresant 8y agoWhat remains the #1 most straightforward CRO advice that works basically every-time: fix your website's speed (especially mobile)!!! In a previous life I ran a Conversion Rate Optimization as a Service business and optimized $100s of millions of transactions for customers across categories. The amount of research on this topic is staggering and a lot of it dates years back like Walmart's seminal review in 2012 (1) showing the devastating impact of speed on conversion rate. In case that's not enough for you Google set up not one, but TWO separate page speed tools to help webmasters fix this chronic problem before they just threw in the towel and took over the job for you with their AMP effort. (2) Oh and by the way did you know that if your site speed is slow Google will penalize your SEO? And drop your Page Quality Score index resulting in higher PPC charges? The best technical guide on the internet to addressing this problem is here - http://httpfast.com/ http://httpfast.com/ - and a comprehensive monitoring service built by the author here - https://www.machmetrics.com/ https://www.machmetrics.com/. (1) http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slides-showing-how-page-speed-correlates-to-business-metrics-at-walmart-com/ http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slid... (2) https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ and https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- stupidbird 8y agoFun story: I pushed back on the implementation of an A/B testing platform and instead said we should focus on improving performance and my Marketing VP literally walked out of the meeting in anger. Infrastructure work is never sexy, but it's so important to everything — even sales performance. A/B testing small changes is something that really big sites like Amazon can do because they have enough volume to justify it. It's kind of like blood doping in sports. If you're already at the top of your game it will make enough of a difference to be significant, but if you're just some average person who can't run a mile... blood doping is the last thing you should do.
- mikekchar 8y agoJust yesterday I was watching a video about a triathlon bike which uses a frame setup that's illegal in normal bike racing. The question was, was it a faster bike? The conclusion was that the bike was quite heavy and not very stiff, so not really a great bike for normal bike racing. However, as a time trial bike where drafting is not allowed (the normal situation in triathlons), this bike could shave off 40 seconds over 40km. Which is a pretty huge amount, the presenter said with a grin. He said it with a grin because it is a huge amount in the context of a competitive time trial -- like the difference between first place and 10th or 20th place perhaps. But as a percentage difference it's roughly a 1.4% increase in speed (assuming you can maintain 50 km/h). It's practically nothing in real terms. In competitive cycling, though, the margins are super small. You might win the Tour de France by 2 minutes, which seems like a pretty big lead, until you realise that's 2 minutes in 80 or 90 hours of cycling. This is why Team Sky's approach of "marginal gains" is so successful -- the difference between first and second place is something like 0.04% performance. We've got this idea that we need to optimise performance (in terms of SEO, etc, etc), but I've never seen anybody quantify the margin of "victory" required. How much better do you need to get to push you over the edge? Because that's what's going to dictate what strategy you need to pursue.
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- m1n1 8y agoI was in a start-up once where the results were deliberately slowed down to make a point that some unique business process was taking place. The start-up failed for many reasons and this was one.
- jimmy1 8y agoWhat if you have done 1, 2 and 3, and now small tweaks are all you have left? At what point do you consider an experience "optimized" and say we just can't squeeze anything else out of this?
- towelr34dy 8y agoIMO, never. Rule #1: Perfection is attainable Rule #2: The universe is not constant: Screen sizes change, browsers, screen types, technology, new competitors come up changing people's expectations, people's tastes change, you expand into new demographics/demos/sales channels which react differently than existing demographics/sales channels, etc. Ideally this work is done with a marketing/programming/operations team all in one, so all aspects are considered, with their trade offs, to forward on a collective understanding of solving user pain points.
- jimmy1 8y agoI am not speaking optimized in terms of perfection I am talking about optimized in terms of revenue generation. At a certain point your offering is it's offering, people found the maximum value out of it, and making it easier to use or testing different ways of delivering that functionality is just adding on lipstick. At what point does it make sense to pursue other revenue models or strategies rather than squeezing out another 1-3% I am bringing this up for a reason -- my company is going through this very thing
- pedrocortes 8y agoConsidering something "optimized" is always going to be a struggle of almost perfectionism (even for myself and my own website haha). I think you should always be critical of what would be better use of your time: optimizing vs getting more (targeted) traffic ;) I think if you think small tweaks are all you have left that you need to consider how can you make your website specific to each persona you have on or even dig through which type of people could benefit from your product even outside of what your currently targeting.
- mikekchar 8y agoOr to put it another way that will strike accord with a different audience. At what point do I stop refactoring my code and say, "This is good enough"? When do I say, "I've achieved my goal and as imperfect as this is, I'm going to start concentrating on new things". Optimising revenue is not desirable. Making enough revenue to achieve your goal is what is desirable. Once you've done that, you should concentrate on new goals. However, just like refactoring code, you may find that you need to go back and revisit something in the future. "Not now" does not necessarily mean "Not ever". It just means that I'm putting this aside until it makes business sense to do it. To complicate things, though, just like programmers have to be the ones calling the shots about whether or not something needs to be refactored (they are the ones who have the required vision and experience to know), marketing people need to be the ones calling the shots about these kinds of things. If you don't trust your programmers to make appropriate decisions, then you have a huge problem. The same is true of marketing people. Fixing that trust issue (either by placing your trust in the people, or replacing people who are not worthy of trust) is hyper difficult, though. It's one of the reasons organisations run around doing ineffective things instead of fixing this kind of root problem.
- jermaustin1 8y agoI don't buy this article at all. I am no longer with the company, but around 10 years ago, I turned a failing consultancy into an SEO SaaS company. Turning revenues from -40k/month to 90+k/month after laying off more than half the staff when we lost our last client and deciding to take our destiny into our own hands building a suite of SEO products. We ran split tests on almost every design change. They weren't always tiny, some were entire page layouts. But even on things like changing the header text saw measurable differences. I built the ability to split test into every facet of our framework. We had the ability to split test pages, transactional emails, marketing emails, and we would tweak everything all the time. If we noticed group a wasn't performing as well as b, we would drop a. There were some tiny things that made major differences: - Email "From" being a person's name and not just the service bumpped onboarding but nearly 20%. - The onboarding subject "Almost Done..." performed about 10% better than "Activate your account" - Having the video auto play converted visitors almost 50% more often than them having to click the play button (it may be evil, but it makes money). - Having the video be an animation vs just a spokesperson talking into a webcam converted 5% better with the same script (+2% better with just reading the text from the page). We had a large audience after we launched our first product free of charge for a limited time (linklicious.co -- formerly linklicious.me -- formerly lts.me), then used that momentum to built out a new product every month or so for the next couple of years. It was a great job in a terrible industry. 80% of my job was inventing new ideas.
- tobr 8y agoHow many impressions were you running if you were able to measure a 2% difference?
- chudi 8y agoIf you want to be completely sure, a really small amount, lets say your baseline is 20% to detect a 2% difference you just need 2 x 6,347 views for each test Check this tools[0] and this article [1] [0] https://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/sample-size.html#!20;80;5;2;0 https://www.evanmiller.org/ab-testing/sample-size.html#!20;8... [1] https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html
- andyidsinga 8y agoI think the section on customer acquisition cost really resonates with me. The corollary, I suppose, is that once you have some customer traction, looking at where those costs are is where you want to spend time with optimization. However, this begs some questions: If I'm spending $500 for a $5000 customer - should I change anything at all to drive down that $500? ...which leads to: At what CAC:Cusotmer Value ratio should I start trying to drive down that cost relative to other costs in the biz? Anyone have any real experiences from their biz' they can share on this subject?
- pedrocortes 8y agoThanks, glad you liked it. This it's something I've noticed people need to come back too when they focus too much on conversions. To answer your question that totally depends because in the end what you'll need is cash flow to maintain that reinvesting process and that's something (finances/management) I'm not an expert in :P
- andyidsinga 8y agoThanks for chiming in here. I've been reading some of your others articles. I like the very practical style and results focus.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoSorry to be so harsh, but this article is mostly BS. Booking.com built there entire corporate culture around A/B testing, and they (i.e. parent Priceline) were one of the top performing stocks of the 00s. If anything, the biggest issue I've seen with A/B testing is that it biases organizations to things that are easy to measure (i.e. shopping conversion) while sometimes at the expense of things that are longer term/harder to measure (like brand reputation). I'd be most interested to hear how some companies have dealt with that shortcoming. But all that said, one of the biggest benefits of a culture around A/B testing is that it gets companies away from the endless back-and-forth around opinions (like this article) and builds a culture of "OK, we'll try your suggestion and see if it succeeds or fails".
- pedrocortes 8y agoNo problem ;) If you noticed I included a section explaining when a split test makes sense and you can tell that Booking.com fit it that criteria as they were already starting to grow a lot.
- hammock 8y agoHi, I highly doubt booking.com's success came from CTA button colors - or any testing on the consumer side of the platform, for that matter. Their success is rooted in how they are able to take advantage of hotels and their distribution power.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoThis is absolutely false, and anyone who works at booking.com will tell you this. https://taplytics.com/blog/how-booking-comss-tests-like-nobodys-business/ https://taplytics.com/blog/how-booking-comss-tests-like-nobo...
- hammock 8y agoBecause they test a lot doesn't mean it's critical to their success. That's a cargo cult fallacy. Your article points to 2-3x industry average conversion rates (for existing traffic), but says nothing about the more important factors of acquisition or inventory.
- madrox 8y agoEvery few years, I read an article critical of testing. It's always written by a designer. It's always the same arguments, and the "solutions" are always qualitative. They rely a lot on rationalizing after the fact. For example, "this redesign failed because you didn't build your website around the EXACT words your customers might describe their problems and their solution" (italics a quote from this article). Saying these things don't actually help you arrive at better process. At this point, all these articles get me thinking about is why they keep getting written. Were these designers abused by bad product managers? Are they ego-driven and don't like having their creativity reduced to quantitative values? I don't know, but I do know that designers who talk this way tend to be toxic to a productive culture. I've experienced that firsthand.
- nostrademons 8y agoNah, it's because they're consultants, which means they need to constantly drum up business, which means that they need potential customers to believe they have unique knowledge that'll help improve their business and all the alternatives are shit. It's a sales pitch. And because they're consultants, they don't need 80% or even 10% of website viewers to convert: they just need a handful of customers who will each pay them tens of thousands of dollars for services. Controversy is great advertising: they get all the folks who hate them to help spread the word about their services. It's the same thing with software methodologists, gurus, and architects. Roughly daily there's a new blog post about how [common practice] is now considered harmful, and you need [proprietary expertise held by consultant] to implement some other replacement instead. These posts may or may not be helpful to your software engineering efforts, but they are certainly helpful to the poster's bottom line.
- mobjack 8y agoTesting is not always the right tool for the job. For many types of businesses, once a website design is good enough, it is really hard to gain meaningful improvements from further changes. Chances are that changing the color or position of button is not going to make a difference. If you have 50 customers a month, you are not going to have enough data measure 5% improvement in conversion even if you let the test run for a year. If a business has 50,000 customers are month, then you can measure a 5% improvement in conversion in a few days and testing is a valuable tool. Until you are at that scale where testing becomes feasible, you are better off just following best practices in design and focus on other areas to drive more business. If you are going to test something, it has to be big bold changes so you are able to measure the significance with a small sample size.
- gofor 8y agoI'm confused. The author starts by stating: "When you focus too much on increasing the conversion of a certain page you'll either not get any positive results or just push the problem to the rest of the funnel, none of which, will increase your revenue btw..." And then they launch into their "How to redesign a SaaS website in 3 weeks" solution with: "#1 - Focus on the money pages. Why would you focus on redesigning pages that barely no one visits or that is not related to a conversion goal?! You need to focus on the pages that are part of the buyer's journey from landing on your website the first time to completing a goal..." Am I reading this wrong or is the author contradicting himself?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]