4 ms·

How not to run an A/B test (2010)

26 points by neya 12y ago

lmkg 12y ago
Part of this is a tooling issue: A/B testing products allow you to use the tool in a way that gives erroneous answers. They don't tell you what's wrong about doing this, and I would go as far as to say that it's intentional. I've spoken to a co-worker who used to be a product manager for one of them. This is intentional. In her words, "The sales guys want to be able to show quick wins to the prospective customer." It would seem that the market favors rose-tinted sycophantic products that tell you your test is awesome, rather than products which give accurate outputs. I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
- blumkvist 12y ago
  Most of the software uses one-way tests for the same reason.
- ssharp 12y ago
  I've long suspected that A/B products "confidence" stats are intentionally bad. I see far too many egregious declarations of "wins" in VWO. Even if they temper it by saying "you should wait a full seven days", I still think they do a large disservice by not forcing larger sample sizes before steering you in any direction. Those tools make it very easy to run tests and assuming any of their users are sophisticated enough to make their own statistical conclusions is such an obvious mistake that they have to be aware of it. The conversion optimization consulting companies I've seen aren't much better. They have no problem reporting "increased" revenue and rates well before there is enough data to support that. I'm calling these types of tests A/B Dog and Pony shows. It's easy to report these gains up, get some short-term love from your boss or client, and hope the chickens never come home to roost or things are forgotten before they do. There was a blog post on Unbounce last week talking about a "successful" A/B test where the combined conversions of A and B over the testing period was 12. This is the kind of information a company specializing in split testing landing pages is providing. The article was since taken down, but it's pretty clear that a large subset of conversion rate folks and the products used for conversion rate optimizations have little interest in dealing with legitimate results. Spend some time reading A/B testing article on Inbound.org or GrowthHackers. I'll call them mostly a 50/50 mix of articles saying why your A/B testing results suck and don't stick and articles bragging about A/B testing results that aren't statistically valid.
  - btilly 12y ago
    One of the problems that the products face is that customers are going to ask, "Why can't you show me the statistics that X offers?" And if you try to say that it is statistically impossible to really offer that, they will tell you, "Well X does it, and they are smart. So you must be wrong!" A classic example is that when Google put together Visual Website Optimizer they included a heuristic for the chance for each version to beat the control. This heuristic was statistically wrong. But since Google offered it, everyone else figured out Google's heuristic and did the same thing.
    - siddharthdeswal 12y ago
      I think you mean Google Website Optimizer, not Visual Website Optimizer.
      - btilly 12y ago
        Whoops, yes.
greggarious 12y ago
This is what happens when people who haven't taken a statistics course try to do statistics. Any competent UX researcher should know about the multiple comparisons problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem
btilly 12y ago
See http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/index.html http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/index.html for a series of responses to this article. I never finished the series, but the second one explains why, in the real world of web tests, the issue it is concerned about is pretty close to a non-issue. (At least if you wait until you've reached a fair portion of the effort you would have been willing to put forth.)

26 points by neya 12y ago

lmkg 12y ago

Part of this is a tooling issue: A/B testing products allow you to use the tool in a way that gives erroneous answers. They don't tell you what's wrong about doing this, and I would go as far as to say that it's intentional. I've spoken to a co-worker who used to be a product manager for one of them. This is intentional. In her words, "The sales guys want to be able to show quick wins to the prospective customer." It would seem that the market favors rose-tinted sycophantic products that tell you your test is awesome, rather than products which give accurate outputs. I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.

blumkvist 12y ago
Most of the software uses one-way tests for the same reason.
ssharp 12y ago
I've long suspected that A/B products "confidence" stats are intentionally bad. I see far too many egregious declarations of "wins" in VWO. Even if they temper it by saying "you should wait a full seven days", I still think they do a large disservice by not forcing larger sample sizes before steering you in any direction. Those tools make it very easy to run tests and assuming any of their users are sophisticated enough to make their own statistical conclusions is such an obvious mistake that they have to be aware of it. The conversion optimization consulting companies I've seen aren't much better. They have no problem reporting "increased" revenue and rates well before there is enough data to support that. I'm calling these types of tests A/B Dog and Pony shows. It's easy to report these gains up, get some short-term love from your boss or client, and hope the chickens never come home to roost or things are forgotten before they do. There was a blog post on Unbounce last week talking about a "successful" A/B test where the combined conversions of A and B over the testing period was 12. This is the kind of information a company specializing in split testing landing pages is providing. The article was since taken down, but it's pretty clear that a large subset of conversion rate folks and the products used for conversion rate optimizations have little interest in dealing with legitimate results. Spend some time reading A/B testing article on Inbound.org or GrowthHackers. I'll call them mostly a 50/50 mix of articles saying why your A/B testing results suck and don't stick and articles bragging about A/B testing results that aren't statistically valid.
- btilly 12y ago
  One of the problems that the products face is that customers are going to ask, "Why can't you show me the statistics that X offers?" And if you try to say that it is statistically impossible to really offer that, they will tell you, "Well X does it, and they are smart. So you must be wrong!" A classic example is that when Google put together Visual Website Optimizer they included a heuristic for the chance for each version to beat the control. This heuristic was statistically wrong. But since Google offered it, everyone else figured out Google's heuristic and did the same thing.
  - siddharthdeswal 12y ago
    I think you mean Google Website Optimizer, not Visual Website Optimizer.
    - btilly 12y ago
      Whoops, yes.

greggarious 12y ago

This is what happens when people who haven't taken a statistics course try to do statistics. Any competent UX researcher should know about the multiple comparisons problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem

btilly 12y ago

See http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/index.html http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/index.html for a series of responses to this article. I never finished the series, but the second one explains why, in the real world of web tests, the issue it is concerned about is pretty close to a non-issue. (At least if you wait until you've reached a fair portion of the effort you would have been willing to put forth.)