August 2013
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 8m
English
Content preview from A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
CHAPTER6
Fail Fast and Learn
Learning to Embrace the Times When A Beats B
If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
Thomas J. Watson, Former Chairman and CEO of IBM
After what we have been showing you, it may be tempting to think that every experiment you run will have a positive outcome. (Why, then, even run the experiment? Just keep changing the thing that you were going to test, and it'll be great!) The reality, of course, is that not every variation is going to beat the control.
Even “failed” experiments have their silver linings, however: recognizing that a particular change will harm your goals is inarguably better than simply making that change, and as an added benefit experiments like this are often the ones that teach us the most about our visitors and what drives them. Indeed, experiments that fail tend to contradict some assumption held by the tester, and the results can point to reasons why that assumption is wrong.
Prime Real Estate versus Familiar Real Estate: IGN
Gaming website IGN wanted to encourage more visitors to the video site that brings them a big portion of their ad revenue. So they tried running an A/B test where they moved the “Videos” link over to the left of the main navigation (Figure 6.1).
FIGURE 6.1 Original IGN navigation versus variation with repositioned “Videos” button.
There are plenty of organizations in which ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.