Testing and Targeting Blog

In the first part of our look at advanced paradigms, I focused on the complex interplay of testing and other parts of your organization. As testing grows, it starts to interact on a nearly daily basis with every part of your organization. If you look at the evolution that we have taken, going … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 0 responses
•  Online Marketing, Testing and Targeting

The art of asking the right questions
Have you ever played the game of Guess Who?  This is the game where you have a crowd of people and you have to ask your opponent questions to figure out who their name is.  This game, like site optimization, is all about asking the right questions.  Contrast these … Read more »

• Rhett Norton
• 0 responses
•  Testing and Targeting, Web Analytics

Strategizing or Executioning
Did you know that when someone is executed in the electric chair, the first jolt of electric current is designed to cause immediate unconsciousness and brain death?   This is interesting to me because the human body is composed of electric currents and energy.  I’ll spare you the 7th grade proton, neutron, electron story, … Read more »

• Rhett Norton
• 0 responses
•  Testing and Targeting

One of the great truths about any organization is that no matter what it is you are doing, each program eventually plateaus and finds a normalization point where it no longer grows at the same rate or with the same push it did before. Whether it is mental fatigue, new objectives, changes in leadership, … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 1 response
•  Online Marketing, Testing and Targeting

Testing seems like such a natural extension of most existing operations that very few groups take the time to evaluate as a separate discipline. They then are shocked when they hit the inevitable points of resistance that all programs run into. They are not prepared for the political, technical, or organizational barriers that … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 0 responses
•  Online Marketing, Testing and Targeting

The beauty of any program or any skill is that no matter where you are, or what you have accomplished, you can always get better. There is no such thing as the perfect testing organization, or a perfect way to use data, which means there are always opportunities to grow and to get better. … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 0 responses
•  Online Marketing, Testing and Targeting

One of the challenges that just about any group new to testing has is trying to get buy-in and support from various other groups, usually with strong opposition from UX and branding teams, but also from just about any other group that interacts with the site. The largest reason for this is Loss Aversion, … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 1 response
•  Testing and Targeting

One of the largest differentiators between starting, middling, and mature successful programs is the speed at which they can execute. The more you move, and the more efficiently that you move, the more value you get and the more you learn. You can’t get anything from running 100 bad tests, but if you … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 1 response
•  Testing and Targeting

One of the funnier trick so of the human mind is the want to pigeon hole or describe things in as much detail as possible. While there are stereotypes and other harmful versions of this, the inverse is usually far more likely to cause havoc with your optimization program, and as such it is … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 2 responses
•  Testing and Targeting

In dealing with the best ways to change a site for maximize ROI, one of the most common refrains I hear is “is the change statistically confident” or “what is the confidence interval”, which often leads to a long discussion around what do those measures really mean. One of the funniest things in … Read more »

• Andrew Anderson
• 0 responses
•  Testing and Targeting