Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer Opens Up, Sheds Beta
Just one year after Google [GOOG] launched Google Website Optimizer, the free A/B split and multivariate testing platform has shed its “beta” status and gone mainstream.
Formerly available only to AdWords users, Google Website Optimizer can now be accessed by anyone with a basic Google account. Even if you only have so much as a Gmail account, you can start testing your website — for free — regardless of whether you’re running a paid search campaign. (No worries, AdWords users, Website Optimizer still works seamlessly with the rest of the Google product suite.)
Companies of all sizes are getting results with Website Optimizer. And since it runs independently of your analytics program — or in sync with it, if you have Google Analytics — there’s little room for argument between departments as to whether or not your company should be testing. You should.
To find out more about Google Website Optimizer, visit their new…
- Website - Unglued from the AdWords site, you can visit Google.com/websiteoptimizer directly.
- Blog - Subscribe to websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com for product updates, case studies and ideas worth testing.
Why is FutureNow so excited about Google Website Optimizer? A few reasons:
- Authorized Consultant - FutureNow was one of the original firms to be invited to test GWO with clients, and the case studies have been remarkable so far. Is yours next?
- Writing the book on GWO - Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar, inventors of FutureNow’s patented Persuasion Architecture® methodology, have teamed up to write Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, in book stores this August.
- It works! - The results speak for themselves.
Of course, knowing what to test — design elements, copy, etc. — is everything. If you’d like to start testing and you’re not sure if you need to hire a firm, here are several free resources to get started with Google Website Optimizer.
Got questions about Website Optimizer or testing in general? We’d love to hear your comments.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Google Website Optimizer Webinar: What Should I Test?
In case you missed the live webinar or had technical difficulties while watching it last week, you can watch it on YouTube now.
The presentation is 63 minutes, and the sound on the YouTube version isn’t the best. If you prefer, you can watch it full-screen and with better sound via WebEx.
The webinar starts with an introduction to Website Optimizer by Google’s Tom Leung. Then I share some of what we have learned at FutureNow over the the past decade of optimizing websites, in order to show some of the most important things you should test. We then go into Q & A, but since there were additional questions that weren’t answered on the call, we will gladly answer them for you in the comments below.
As always, if you need help figuring out the specifics of what to test on your site, we can help.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Top 7 Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites
On our “Ask the Experts” post, one reader asked how to go about optimizing a low-traffic website.
We get this question a lot.
Marketers — particularly small business owners and do-it-yourself-ers — want to know if optimization is worth it. They’re short on time and they’re dealing with limited resources. They can’t wait six months to fix something that’s broken now. They don’t have the luxury.
If you’ve realized optimization can’t wait, and you don’t have the budget to hire a firm, consider these…
Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites
1.) Get a testing platform — Any testing platform will do, but if your budget is tight, we recommend using Google Website Optimizer. It’s free to use and FutureNow has developed several free resources to help you get started.
2.) Stick to A/B split testing — For a low-traffic site, you’ll want to stay away from multivariate tests and stick to simpler A/B split testing. Multivariate testing involves optimizing more than one page element at a time, often with more than one variation per element on a given page. For example, you might be testing four different headlines, three different pictures, and two variations of your body copy on a given landing page. That means you’ve just created 24 (4×3x2) different page combinations for your test. Getting enough traffic to come up with a statistically valid results could take a low-traffic site an exceedingly long time to do that. Assuming you had 50 visits per day and a brilliantly high current conversion rate of 10%, that still means it would still take more than two thousand days (about 6 years!) to get any data worth looking at. Meanwhile, A/B testing only a few combinations can give you statistically valid data within a month or two. Again, low-traffic sites should stick to A/B testing. (This white paper can help you determine whether it’s too little or too early to A/B test.)
3.) Don’t make hasty conclusions — Be patient. Wait for the tests to fully complete before jumping to conclusions. Once they do complete, take a deep breath. On any given test page, the “Chance to Beat Original” and “Chance to Beat All” percentages are crucial — and potentially misleading if you’re not up on your statistics. Basically, anything less than 90% is simply a trend that might be reversed from one week to the next. We’ve actually seen these kind of reversals happen, where a positive change (with 70% chance to beat original) flipped negative from one week to the next. Think of it this way: If you randomly flip a coin, you could get 3-4 heads in a row over 4 flips and conclude that heads was the clear “winner” over tails. Not smart. Only after many, many flips is it safe to assume you have a clear winner (or a very weird coin).
4.) Know what you’re looking for — Make sure you know how to get a hypothesis worth testing. In other words, you should know ahead of time how to interpret the results. Don’t randomly test this image or that headline. Do so because you have reason to believe the headline “should” better appeal to buyers with a given buying motivation, or because the picture “should” resolve a particular concern. That way, you have a basis for interpreting the results. That doesn’t mean the results will be absolutely conclusive (it’s possible that people really do have your hypothesized motivation but your headline was merely a bad execution of the concept), but you’ll have a way to interpret the results and do further analysis if needed. Intelligent testing essential, especially when you don’t have much traffic.
5.) Test one click at a time* — Shorten the distance between the Experiment Page (where you’re running the test) and the Goal Page (where you count conversions). This will yield conclusive results in less time. A quick e-commerce example: Use the shopping cart as a Goal Page for a test being run on a Product Page (as opposed to using the Order Confirmation Page as the Goal Page).
6.) Ensure success with Pay-Per-Click* — Purchasing traffic to validate changes to your site is like buying insurance on the effectiveness of your web design. If your PPC ads are well targeted and attract more (and more qualified) visitors, your test results will be more accurate. With enough visitors, testing is like letting visitors design your site for you.
7.) Prioritize your optimization efforts — Optimizing for usability and conversion is usually easier than optimizing for persuasion. Before a site can persuade, its basic elements must work. Go for the low-hanging fruit, then work your way up the Hierarchy of Optimization.
Got questions on how to optimize your site? Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.
. .
*Indicates a tip that has been added to the list.
[Editor’s Note: Today is your last chance to register for the Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, happening tomorrow, Friday the 28th, in San Francisco.We’re keeping class size small and there are only two or three tickets left, so hop to it!]
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
The Price of Perfection
Recently, one of our regular readers blogged about testing with Google Website Optimizer (GWO).
In the discussion thread, a respondent worried that he may not be able to use GWO because his company’s website has a database-driven content management system. He described himself as a “perfectionist” and it didn’t settle well that content was somehow taken “out” of his site and hosted on Google. Further, one of his company’s consultants commented to him that GWO just “isn’t useful” for a complex database-driven site.
First off, we can tell you from experience* that his consultant is mistaken. (See explanation here.)
Secondly, everyone thinks their own site is complex. Everyone. (Just like everyone thinks their kid is cute enough to be a model for Gap Kids.) But ecommerce sites are pretty similar — and simple. It goes something like this:
- Get customer to site
- Display product to customer
- Help customer decide to buy
- Accept her money with a thank you
- Ship out the goods
- Repeat
Customers don’t care if what we have behind-the-scenes is simple or complex. All the customer cares about is how simple and enjoyable — or not — the experience is for them.
Now, back to the issue of perfectionism. This fear of taking an incremental step lest it turn out wrong, even if the step is toward improvement, seems to evoke fear, dread and a certain “deer in the headlights” mentality.
Ever hear the adage, “Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong”? It’s a great way to think about testing and improvement of any kind, because it deals with the fact that the first step toward improvement always “feels” the hardest. It speaks to the moment when you’re most susceptible to false objections like “It’s too complex!” or “That’s inefficient!”
Let’s get those first steps out of the way. Let’s embrace being wrong, because we will almost surely learn some way to improve. The fact that the improvement won’t be immediate or perfect just isn’t a viable reason not to try. Asking for it to be perfect first and always is a perfect recipe for “never”.
If your company does, say, $5m/yr online and you can raise the conversion rate from, say, 4% to 5% (a 20% lift) because of your testing with GWO — or any testing tool for that matter — you just added $1 million ($5m x 20%) to the bottom line. If I were a CEO and found that so-called perfection was costing me $1m/yr in lost revenues, plus employee salary, I’m pretty sure I could find less expensive, less perfect employees.
I wonder, just how many companies out there are paying millions of dollars a year for perfectionism? And how many imperfect employees, freed from this apotheosis, consistently deliver better results for their companies and their customers?
Could this be why three quarters of online retailers don’t test even though it’s free?
. .
*FutureNow is an Authorized Consultant for Google Website Optimizer.
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Written by:John Quarto-vonTivadar
How to Prioritize Your Optimization
Everyone wants to optimize. If you’re like most companies, you have a laundry list of things you’d like to do with your site. You know instinctively that all the items on the list are of equal value. You know some might have more impact than others. You also know these items require different amounts of effort and resources. So the obvious question is, “Where do I begin?”
You’re likely familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which states that human beings must first prioritize basic needs, such as food and shelter, before they’re able to seek higher needs, like social interaction and self-actualization needs. What good is owning a Harley-Davidson or finding the perfect outfit for a trip to a club if you’re starving to death?
Looking at your site in a similar fashion is extremely helpful. Since I first introduced our concept of the hierarchy of optimization last year, I’ve wanted to dig into it a little deeper:
Taking a step back and examining the entire pyramid will help you better assess where to start or assist you in knowing exactly what you’re optimizing now. The hierarchy also gives insight into optimization’s potential impact.
Let’s start at the bottom. Remember, the higher you go on the pyramid, the bigger the impact you’ll make on optimization. Also remember that the pyramid doesn’t indicate the level of effort needed to optimize, because this is as different from site to site as we are different from each other.
The Hierarchy of Optimization
Function is almost below the basics. Does your site have long periods of downtime? Do you deliver hundreds or thousands of 404s? Does your shopping cart constantly freeze up on visitors? Can users log in? Do images load? Is your site heavy on customer-facing errors? As a first order of business, work to make your site as reliable as the sunrise.
Another aspect of function is making sure that back-end functions are also in place. We’ve worked with companies that were spending ample on marketing and great site widgets, but the back-end shipping process was broken, causing an embarrassing amount of orders to go unfulfilled. This isn’t sexy marketing; it’s Business 101. Why go through all the hard work to market and sell a $1,000 dress only to have the customer walk up to a dirty checkout lane with a broken cash register circa 1950?
Having solid, clean user data for analytics also falls in the function level, otherwise anything higher up on the pyramid can’t be optimized with any accuracy or confidence.
How accessible is your site? Remember the recent lawsuit brought against Target.com for not having alt tags on its images? Font size, language issues, and pages and sections that don’t load correctly are other accessibility issues. Browser-specific issues fall in this level as well. Check your access logs to determine if you’re under-serving or ignoring a visitor segment. Optimize for people with disabilities, allow fonts to be resizable for users who need larger print, and solve browser-specific issues. If you remember, 38 percent of the retailers had difficult-to-read fonts in our 2007 Customer Experience Study. Optimize for dial-up users (there are still plenty of them out there). Access for mobile devices should also be considered.
Are your buttons easy to find and see? Is the search dialog where users expect it? Do you use drop-downs when you could use a radio button? Usability is about moving site elements around and using size, color, and contrast to improve the ease of use of your site. Thousands of great articles have been written about usability. Jared Spool’s are my favorites.
Call-to-action button optimization is a popular optimization item for marketers. For most, the effort is low, and it can have significant impact. Still, it’s only one aspect of the usability equation.
While similar to and often confused with usability, the intuitive layer is about improving the flow of the visitor’s site experience and optimizing aspects that keep the visitors from buying. Point-of-action assurances, product detail pop-ups, customer reviews, upfront shipping costs, and current in-stock messaging all reduce friction in the buying process, anticipate customer questions, and offer answers at the point the customer asks.
On a lead generation site, optimize form questions, try to shorten the time needed to fill out the form, and introduce ways for the visitor to take more control of when and how they’re contacted.
At the top of the pyramid are site elements that move a customer toward making a decision to buy your specific product. Persuasion issues are almost always high impact.
Improving persuasion on your site is mostly done by improving copy or product images. Product descriptions, feature tours, demos, and product comparisons (even with competitors) are considered persuasive issues. On a lead gen or B2B (define) site, it’s your service description, case studies, testimonials, and white papers. Make sure your copy addresses each of your personas.
Brand image and a site’s overall look and feel are often persuasion issues, especially if there’s a disconnect between the brand promise and site design. But have no doubt that a strong familiar branded product will forgive a multitude of site errors, as many of us have endured horrible sites and process to buy products and services we really wanted.
Assuming the bottom three levels are sound on your site, persuasion scenario planning will assist in planning and measuring the intuitive and persuasion challenges you face.
Conclusion
Start at the pyramid’s bottom and list each of the optimization tests or changes you need to consider. For each item, rank the effort it will take your team to make the change or test possible. Start with low-effort items, even if they’re low on the pyramid. Then work your way up.
Best of luck with your optimization efforts this year. If you need help planning and prioritizing your tests, we’d be happy to oblige.
This originally appeared in my ClickZ column from 2/29/08.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
“What Should I Test?” Free Google + Future Now Webinar
In the past few months, we’ve received emails and comments from people who want to know the secret. They’ve read a few posts on website optimization testing, but they’re disillusioned. Their tests haven’t been effective — meanwhile, Future Now keeps yammering about how…
“Lead generation went up 5,000%!” (Tumbleweed rolls.)
“They doubled their conversion rate!” (Crickets chirp in disbelief.)*
Don’t think you can do it? Bryan Eisenberg and Google’s Tom Leung disagree. Join them for a free webinar on March 11th.
*Please Note: Case studies not boring when about your site.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Webinar: Getting Results with Google Website Optimizer
Who: Google Website Optimizer’s Product Manager, Tom Leung, and Future Now co-founder Bryan Eisenberg.
What: Want to improve your website’s performance? Interested in learning how to get the most out of Google’s free A/B and multivariate testing tool, Website Optimizer? This one’s for you.
In previous webinars (”Introduction to Website Optimizer” and “Creating and Launching Experiments“), the Google Analytics and Google AdWords teams have shown how to use the tool. But this time around, they’ll be delving into a more fundamental question: “What should I test?”
In recent articles, we’ve shown how testing can transform your site over time. Yet it doesn’t do much good just to know you should test. Without a clear hypothesis, it’s easy to lose track of your own guesswork. Knowing how to test a hypothesis is critical. So, by popular demand after many Website Optimizer users asked for more insight on what exactly they should test, Google has invited us — and all of you — to join them for this free tutorial.
During this online seminar, Tom and Bryan will:
- provide a brief introduction to Website Optimizer for newer users
- talk about testing best practices
- discuss some of the top elements to test on any webpage, and
- review top mistakes people make when developing new content to test.
Where: Your computer
When: Tuesday, March 11th | 9 - 10 am PST | 12 pm EST | 4 pm GMT
Why: Because you’ve reviewed Future Now’s 7 free resources to get you started with Website Optimizer, and, sure enough, you’re ready to get started — almost.
Is this something you can do on your own, or should you hire a website optimization firm? That all depends on the time and resources you’re willing to put into it. But before you dive in with both feet, it’s smart to know what’s worth testing.
Register for Free! Upon registration, Google invites you to submit specific topics you’d like Tom and Bryan to cover.
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Website Optimization Starts With a Hypothesis
NINE OUT OF TEN PEOPLE WOULD RATHER NOT READ THIS SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS.
That may or may not be true. At the moment, this statement is merely a guess, an assumption — but it’s testable. It’s a hypothesis.
People love to insist that your website is made of magical ones and zeros. “It’s HTML,” they’ll say. “It lives on triple-redundant co-located servers,” they’ll argue. Yet the truth is much simpler, and scarier, than that.
Your website is a tower of assumptions. Everyone’s is. Perhaps yours was built according to a specific blueprint. Maybe it was built from a template. Either way, if it’s not properly maintained, the structure will collapse. But before you demolish the current structure and start over from the ground up, you should test the existing site.
If you want to improve your website, testing provides the scaffolding to fix it. And just as you wouldn’t hire a renovation crew that uses scaffolding made of toothpicks, your optimization tests require strong hypotheses. Of course, you can always test a bunch of random variables and see which configuration works best with your visitors, but that generally takes too long, adds noise to the data, and makes it difficult to gain any real insight.
The better thing to do is to start with a hypothesis.
Dropping Science
In my last post, I showed how testing allows you to optimize by letting visitors design your site for you. By giving them new versions of navigation and content elements and closely monitoring to see which ones work best, your visitors can vote with their clicks, and you can more easily adjust your site to fit their needs.
Be careful, though. If you don’t have a solid hypothesis, improvements can take longer — and be more incremental — than they should be. Recycling random variations of a page just to see what works often yields a much smaller return on investment than hiring a website optimization firm.
It’s the most common problem we see among companies that don’t outsource their testing: They don’t really know what to test.
Regardless of who tests your website, the scientific method [define] must drive the process. Your venture into testing must begin with curiosity. Curiosity is fundamental to humanity, and the basis for our achievements. To have success online, you must be curious as to why things happen and what is influencing them.
• Observation: “Why do so few people add an item to their cart from the product page?”
• Observation: “Why do my blog posts with short titles seem to get more comments?”
Curiosity is the initial spark to start a learning experience, but ideas and explanations must be conjured to satisfy that curiosity. This is where the hypothesis comes from.
Don’t Believe the Hypothesis
Again, a hypothesis is just an assumption. The ideas and explanations you base this assumption on can come from real world examples or basic intuition. To write a hypothesis, simply take the action you’re considering and state the result — a benefit, we hope — that you expect it to have.
• Hypothesis: “Making the ‘add to cart’ button larger will increase our conversion rate.”
• Hypothesis: “Using blog post titles with six words or less will increase the amount of comments.”
The one and only purpose of running a website optimization test is to prove (or disprove) your hypothesis by exposing it to real world conditions. As such, you’ll need to create variations of the elements you wish to test in a way that properly reflects your hypothesis, so you can test them against the original version to see which one works best.
Let’s start with “Making the add to cart buttons larger will increase our conversion rate.” To test this hypothesis, you’ll need to create a version of the page with a larger add to cart button. To be sure, you may also want to test more than one size. If a large button isn’t ideal, maybe a medium-sized one is.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat… TEST
Lets say the test proves our hypothesis to be valid and you decide to make the “add to cart” button larger. Wonderful, but you might want to hold off on the champagne.
Now it’s time to create another hypothesis about the best color for the “add to cart” button. For instance, “A green ‘add to cart’ button will yield a higher conversion rate than similar red or blue buttons.”
The point is to learn something — anything — about what is and isn’t working on your site. Approach testing in a systematic way and record what you learn to guide you through future tests. You may also want to revisit certain tests to see if they still hold true, especially if you’ve changed other elements on the page.
It’s very important not to get discouraged. Even if your hypothesis is disproved, you’ve learned something valuable; that what you have is working well enough for you to focus on another area of your site that needs attention.
On the other hand, if your hypothesis is strong — and the test results prove it — you’ve begun remodeling your “tower built on assumptions” into a high-rise casino, where the odds are stacked neatly in your favor.
. . .
[Editor’s Note: Blinded by science? Need a renovation? Future Now can help you test it.]
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
Is Something Wrong With Your Design?
I’m still settling in from my trip last week to the Internet Retailer Design conference. If you didn’t attend, you missed a great first-time show, so you’ll have to check it out next year.
Over 800 people showed up to hear the speakers and meet with consultants (like me) to evaluate their current websites — and some even discussed mock-ups and prototypes of new versions of their sites. My back-of-the-napkin calculation is that Internet Retailer gave away around $150,000 worth of consultations, but I’ll ask you the one common question I asked several of the companies I met with just for the price of spending a few minutes reading.
What makes you think the new design you’re working on is going to work any better than the one you have today?
I recall sitting with one of the most recognized brands on the Web and him pulling out his mock-ups. They felt that they had issues around how products were presented and how their navigation worked. They offered a complex menu with way too many options in their current navigation, and were hoping to improve it by using a top level menu with a javascript rollover.
“What research do you have that indicates that new navigation will work better than the current one?” I asked. He was honest and said, “None.”
So why don’t you test it?
Internet Retailer did a pre-conference survey and asked the top 500 retailers if they’re doing multivariate or A/B testing, and included the results in their Website Design & Usability Guide.
Amazingly, 76.7% of retailers surveyed don’t test!
Huh? Now that you can get A/B and Multivariate testing tools for free from Google, why aren’t you testing?
We’ve also found that it’s safer to roll out a redesign in stages, in order to avoid the initial drop in conversion that often results from a redesign. Why not roll this out as a series of tests?
If you need help, call us at 877-643-7244 (ext. 3316). We’d be happy to help you make more money before and after your redesign.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Testing Add-to-Cart Buttons: Stuck in the Middle With You
Bryan walked into my office the other day to point out an interesting item found while surfing: a left-sided add-to-cart button on a product detail page.
We chatted back and forth about the conversion issues involved with placing it there — and in fact, one of our Conversion Analysts, Peter, commented on this very topic in his latest post — but soon our conversation turned to something much more interesting than left-sided calls to action: the testing of left-sided calls to action.
“Do you think they tested it?” Bryan asked.
“Hmm, the Joker in me wants to say Yes, but I’m guessing the money bet is No,” I replied.
Now, that’s not because Crutchfield doesn’t test. In fact, I’ve no idea at all what sort of testing culture Crutchfield nurtures; I’m just saying that in our experience, only rarely does this sort of innovation ever come about from testing. Instead, it’s sadly de rigeur for it to arise from a designer wanting to try something “different”, or an IT staff that doesn’t perceive one shopping cart as different from another, or maybe Matilda the Intern just forget an HTML tag. Anyway, the point is to go with the simplest explanation — which, in 2008, is that most companies still don’t test.
“I think you’re right,” Bryan continued, “cuz if they did test it, it probably wouldn’t do well.”
“Maybe some Clown in IT or Marketing just wanted to be ‘kewl’.”
Here’s what we’re talking about, as shown on Crutchfield.com:
Intuitively, I hope you’ll agree with us that right-sided feels like a better than even-money bet (though that in itself is a reason to do a test) — but what’s the point of leveraging your intuition to be “directionally correct” unless you eventually try to back it up with some evidence that you’re actually correct?
That started me down the road thinking about how to actually test this hypothesis.
(I can be wordy, so if you’ve lost the trail of thought, the question is, “Which converts better? Right- orLeft-sided Add-To-Carts?” and the hypothesis would be, “Right-sided Add-To-Carts convert better than Left-sided Add-To-Carts.”)
Here’s where it gets interesting: The supposition is that most Web surfers are so used to right-sided Add-To-Carts (and right-sided Calls-to-action, generally) that a left-sided one is bound to produce some cognitive dissonance. It might not be consciously noticed — less so on “narrower” sites and more so on wider ones — but the placement on the left will “feel” odd.
With that in mind, just how do you go about running a test you already know has a skew to it? How would you really determine whether the Clowns or the Jokers win The Great Add-To-Cart Positioning Debate of Aught-Eight?
Here’s what I would do: First off, start with the most obvious test, because we have to get a quick benchmark of just how far Clown is from Joker. Throw some percentage of traffic at the left-sided Add-To-Cart — enough for some statistical significance — and see just how well Right does vis-á-vis Left. (The fascinating thing about intuition is that a fair percentage of the time it’s fabulously, gloriously, achingly, wrong — and if this is one of those times, better to find out early and move on to the next good idea.)
Assuming we’ve shown some evidence of the skew in favor of right-sided shopping carts — otherwise, why continue reading this post? — how do we go about removing the skew that comes about from people being “trained” that right-sided is “normal” to answer the real question: If folks weren’t biased by convention, which side converts better?
To do that, what you’d really want is to look among your customers who’ve already successfully converted using one particular side and to present them with similarly-sided add-to-carts in the future (hmm, might have to set a cookie!), so you can gauge what the conversion rate is for people who’ve shown at least some indication that they can successfully convert.** The idea here is that, all else being equal — something the pre-existing bias hurts — the true question should be, “Do people actually have a preference for sidedness at all”?
By picking only from those who’ve successfully converted previously, you’re making a first attempt to say, “Hey, at least these folks don’t seem to be impeded by a systemic bias”; therefore, those who buy consistently using left-sided calls to action might then be expected to convert at approximately the same rate as those who buy consistently using right-sided calls to action.
“And surely,” you might argue, “those who show a preference for left-sided add-to-carts should convert better when consistently presented with left-sided add-to-carts than Right-Siders who are suddenly presented with a left-sided add-to-cart.”
See, you’ve switched the tables.
Get it? In short, you try to come up with series of tests — a Testing Campaign, if you will — which attempt to disprove the way your original hypothesis was leaning (we figured Right would do better, so let’s design tests that indicate when Right does poorer), and let us challenge any underlying bias (i.e., that Add-To-Cartss typically appear on the Right) that gives unfair advantage.
Well, those are my thoughts on the subject. What I hope you got out of that is that a “culture of testing” means thinking as deeply about the design of experiments as it does their performance.
I’d love to hear more about you. Are you a “Clown” or a “Joker”? Or are you just “Stuck in the Middle”? Would your brand loyalty or the customer’s familiarity with your site’s User Interface simply override any preference you have for being a Clown or a Joker?
- - - - - - -
**A few readers will feel reassured to know that, in actuality, you’d still send at least a few visitors who preferred one Side to see an opposite-Side call-to-action once in a while just to keep things honest; enough to get insight from the data, but not enough to cost the company too much from the loss from the expected conversion differential. I figured I’d say that as a footnote before some Sharp Tack out there writes in to scold me. 
[Author’s Note: What’s with all the Clown and Joker references, you ask? From the song “Stuck In The Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel (c.1973), comes the lyric “Clowns to the Left of me/Jokers to the Right/Here I am/Stuck in the Middle with You.” I was bound and determined to get that song into a post sometime this month, just to stop humming it in my head. There. Now it’s your problem. 
]
[Editor’s Note: Want more profitable ideas on how to beat assumptions with better testing? Take a look at our free website testing resources, including John’s A/B testing white paper.]
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Written by:John Quarto-vonTivadar
