Posted december 04, 2022

5 best practices to building winning A/B testing program

Data-driven experimentation is all about discovering customer insights and testing new ideas so you can create great digital experiences with confidence.

David Carlile
David Carlile
Senior Director of Product Strategy, Optimizely
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When done right, the best ideas and outcomes will quickly rise to the top, providing you a clear path to:

  • Optimize customer experiences – Test a variety of content, layouts, site navigation maps and customer journey touchpoints to create impactful personalized experiences
  • Increase revenue from websites – Test various checkout funnels, landing pages and customer responses to marketing campaigns to understand customer motivators, recommend the next best action and drive frictionless customer purchases
  • Iterate new products and services faster – Test new features to know what triggers customer actions and drives customer engagement

While digital experimentation can remove guesswork and improve decision making, creating quality experiments and extracting actionable insights from the results can be tricky and overwhelming for even the most proficient marketing and digital experience teams. Growing complexities such as more tools and systems, more collaboration with engineering and product teams, shrinking budgets and ever-changing customer expectations are not making these processes any easier. It’s these challenges that got Optimizely and Google Cloud thinking about how to build a winning experimentation program. 

The good news is that thousands of businesses all over the world are overcoming these challenges with the adoption of proven best practices and the implementation of trusted technology solutions such as Optimizely’s leading experimentation platform powered by Google Cloud. This powerful combination will enable you to unleash your digital potential, market better together and build a culture of experimentation.

Adopting best practices: Worksheets and templates to jumpstart your digital experimentation program

Whether you are performing A/B web testing, analyzing customer data or validating product features, Optimizely and Google Cloud deliver the customer insights needed to go to market smarter and supercharge your marketing results. We are continuously assessing best practices across millions of experiments to simplify your digital experimentation journey, understand customer responses to marketing campaigns in real time and create winning content with confidence, backed by data.

Here are five editable worksheets and templates to help you build a winning digital experimentation program:

1) Experimentation Ideation Framework

The Experimentation Ideation Framework covers the first steps required to bring your digital experiment ideas to life. Use this framework to guide experimentation ideas from start to finish, understand what data you need to collect and build a winning hypothesis.

2) Experimentation Prioritization Index

The Experimentation Prioritization Index is a template used to prioritize which experiments should run first based on what ideas will have the most impact on the business. You can judge ideas by comparing business impact metrics such as higher conversion rates, increased revenue or reduced internal costs to the business efforts such as technologies and teams.

3) Experimentation Roadmap Worksheet

Once you decide which experiments to run first, it’s time to refine your idea using the Experimentation Roadmap Worksheet. Plan and visualize every detail contributing to your experiment set up, including the top metric you will use to measure success and the audience you will target for the experiment. It will also allow you to analyze your findings and plan your next steps.

4) Results Sharing Presentation Template

Sharing results and findings is vital to growing a culture of experimentation and securing executive buy-in. The Results Sharing Presentation Template explains how to communicate your experimentation objectives and goals, results overview and what data-driven decisions have been made. 

5) Experimentation In Action – A Vault of Ideas   

Looking for experimentation ideas? Here’s a collection of inspirational testing ideas to kickstart the brainstorming process. This dynamic document currently includes testing ideas for the media, travel, retail and B2B industries.

Are you ready to build a winning digital experimentation program?

In summary, adopting best-in-class experimentation practices and a leading experimentation platform from Optimizely and Google Cloud enables you to unleash your digital marketing potential and achieve greater business results – securely, seamlessly and collaboratively. Implementing these best practice worksheets and templates make it quick and easy to experiment your way to an amazing customer experience and a winning digital experimentation program.

Ready to get started? Download the “How to build a winning experimentation program” ebook to access valuable worksheets and templates.

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