Tips on How to Build a Strategy for Testing and Optimization

New tools have made online testing easier for marketers, providing opportunities for organizations to activate their data. Instead of simply collecting and reporting on data, marketers are excited to activate it by using it to generate and test hypotheses.

Whether you’re just starting with A/B testing, or have been testing for a while but haven’t seen the results you were looking for, here are three tips to help you create a testing strategy that will provide good, actionable results:

Zero in on your top strategic goals. This should be more specific than simply “growing revenue,” and may require a quantitative and qualitative research as well as a thorough understanding of the organization’s business model.

Decide how the testing process should work. Consider the size of your audience, how long tests need to run to achieve statistical significance, and how aggressive the changes need to be in order to yield conclusive results. Doing this research before starting (or re-starting) a testing program will allow marketers to avoid missed opportunities and ineffective experiments that may lead to a lack of confidence in testing.

Don’t forget to stay flexible.  Many testing strategies rest on assumptions that may turn out to be unsound; marketers should be ready to shift focus and re-design their experiments.

For a deeper understanding of how to set up a testing and optimization strategy read the complete article on Marketing Land: To Maximize The Value Of Testing, Start With A Strategy.