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

  • 1h 51m
  • Dan Siroker, Pete Koomen
  • John Wiley & Sons (US)
  • 2013

A guide to delivering a better user experience through A/B testing

A/B Testing outlines a simple way to test several different versions of a web page with live traffic, and then measure the effect each version has on visitors. Using A/B testing you can determine the most effective way to increase conversion rate—the rate at which visitors convert into customers. The average conversion rate across the web is only 2%. That means 98% of visitors to most websites don't end up converting. Using A/B testing, companies can improve the effectiveness of their marketing and user experience and in doing so can sometimes double or triple their conversion rates.

In the past, marketing teams were dependent on IT and engineering to implement A/B tests, and that proved to be a costly bottleneck. Today, the market for A/B testing is growing very fast, in no small part due to this transition from IT to marketing.

  • Offers best practices and lessons learned from over 100,000 experiments run by over 2,000 Optimizely customers
  • Details a roadmap for how to use A/B testing to personalize your customer's web experience and a practical guide to start A/B testing today
  • Authors Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen are cofounders of Optimizely.com, an user-friendly testing system that more than 2,000 organizations use

Marketers and web professionals will become obsolete if they don't embrace a data-driven approach to decision making. This book shows you how, no matter your technical expertise.

About the Authors

DAN SIROKER is the cofounder and CEO of Optimizely. The inspiration for Optimizely came from Dan's experience as the Director of Analytics for the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign. Optimizely is the product Dan wishes he had back then to make it easy for anybody to do A/B testing. In 2012, Forbes named Dan one of the Top 30 under 30 in Technology. Dan was formerly a product manager for Google Chrome and AdWords.

PETE KOOMEN is the co-founder and President of Optimizely. After earning his MS in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Pete joined Google as a product manager where he helped launch and grow Google App Engine to more than 150,000 developers. In 2009, Pete teamed up with Dan to start their first company, CarrotSticks, an online math game for kids. Less than a year later, Pete and Dan created Optimizely during the Y Combinator winter 2010 class. In between mountain climbing adventures, Pete runs product, engineering, and design at Optimizely.

In this Book

  • How A/B Testing Helped Win the White House—Twice—The $57 Million Button
  • What to Test—Optimization in Five Steps
  • Seek the Global Maximum—Refinement and Exploration
  • Less is More—Reduce Choices—When Subtraction Adds Value
  • Words Matter—Focus on Your Call to Action—How a Few Words Can Make a Huge Difference
  • Fail Fast and Learn—Learning to Embrace the Times When a Beats B
  • Choose the Solution That's Right for Your Organization—Deciding Whether to Build, Buy, or Hire
  • The Cure for the HiPPO Syndrome—Getting Buy-In and Proving Value
  • The A/B Testing Dream Team—Bringing Everyone Together
  • Iterate, Iterate, Iterate—The Art of Asking Many Small Questions Rather than One Big One
  • How A/B Tests Can Go Awry—Potential Mistakes and Pitfalls to Avoid
  • Beyond the Page—Non-Website A/B Testing—How to Test Email and Pricing
  • Personalize, Personalize, Personalize—Moving beyond the One-to-ManyWeb
  • Conclusion
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