A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers

CHAPTER7

Choose the Solution That's Right for Your Organization

Deciding Whether to Build, Buy, or Hire

We've explored some case studies that illuminate A/B testing's guiding principles and high-level concepts. Now it's time to get started, and that means it's time to get practical.

The first step is making a high-level decision about how you'll bring testing onboard: you can build your own testing tool in-house, buy a testing platform, or hire a consultant or agency to do the testing for you. There's no wrong choice, and each has its pros and cons. Indeed, many organizations elect to combine more than one of these approaches. We walk you through the things to consider when making the decision about what's best for your needs.

Option One: Build

Building a testing solution in-house is a viable option for organizations that have significant engineering resources available. We've found that most companies don't decide to suddenly build a testing tool from scratch without an engineering team that's closely tied to the process. A homegrown testing tool is usually something that organizations add on to an already established data-gathering and analytics machine.

Building an in-house solution requires substantial engineering effort, so it's rare for small companies with limited engineering resources to pursue this path. Typically only larger teams with specialized needs and enough dedicated engineering resources to pull it off will build a solution for themselves. For example, Amazon ...