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As soon as significance is achieved, we show a "winner" If you've described that accurately, you're hurting some of your customers. It's not well-known (though
by Ovid 13y ago
As soon as significance is achieved, we show a "winner"
If you've described that accurately, you're hurting some of your customers. It's not well-known (though it should be obvious, in retrospect), but a test can produce a false positive when, in fact, it's a negative.
The problem is that there is always noise in customer data and sometimes you'll randomly have enough conversions such that one of your tests will show a winner when it's not.
Matts Einersen has some simulation code to show this: http://www.einarsen.no/is-your-ab-testing-effort-just-chasing-statistical-ghosts/ http://www.einarsen.no/is-your-ab-testing-effort-just-chasin...
Evan Miller has a more in-depth (but harder to follow) discussion here: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html
If, in fact, you show the winner as soon as significance is achieved, it's then trivial to demonstrate that some of your customers will lose money as a result. However, if you take this knowledge and then find a good way to incorporate this into your tool, you may have another great selling point that competitors do not (that being said, the idea is complicated enough that some customers won't understand it).
- siddharthdeswal 13y agoTrying to do exactly that at http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-split-test-duration/ http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-split-test-duration/ and http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-split-significance-calculator/ http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ab-split-significance-calc... but yeah, we need a better way to present this.
- Ovid 13y agoHave you considered adding a "recommend days" field to your product? Given the number of people per experiment and the number of conversions, you could potentially calculate a minimum time to run the experiment and simply explain that sometimes you are more likely to get false positives prior to the minimum time? Also, it makes me very happy to know that you're aware of this problem and are trying to tackle it. It makes me more likely to recommend it to clients.