|
I'm someone currently specializing in analytics as a digital marketer at work (and learning R and a bit of Python in my spare time for greater and swifter data analysis!) Similar to your former superior, I'm also coming out of a liberal arts background. I just want to make it clear that someone like me, despite their background, agrees with you that the person you were reporting to was foolish to even bother A/B testing such minor elements at 100 hits/day. Sadly, many foolish "SEOs"/"digital marketers"/"growth hackers" have this same mentality that such subtle changes--despite low traffic--still offer meaningful information to digest and further analyze. But hey, they gotta keep their boss/clients on-board for the thrill and payment, right? For everyone out there, remember that often outside the highest echelon of traffic levels, this testing is often performed by marketers with BAs in business administration, marketing, or liberal arts degrees like me. They are often not the statisticians referenced in this document. And sadly they may likely be people unlike me, unwilling to stretch out into a programming languages for data analysis and may have never cracked open a book on statistics. But frankly they have other things to worry about--like staying in your budget and overall digital branding and marketing strategy. Their budget and time is likely better applied outside of A/B testing. If you have a mathematics background, reach out to your marketing department. If you consider yourself a math-wiz, reach out to the "growth hacker" or "SEO" a few feet away. They deal with the stuff you don't want to deal with. You deal with the stuff they don't want to deal with. Help each other out and engage in a conversation to better help your business. At least your superiors would appreciate it. Personally, when it comes to landing pages, I test much more dramatic shifts--significant changes to the entire design or to the header imagery along with call-to-action. I don't buy into the testing of slight adjustments to things like font size or button color (and especially when there is such so low volume). That said, I've never worked with hundreds of thousands of visitors per month on a site, where anyone would imagine smaller changes for testing can make a bit more sense to look into. gkoberger, I'm sorry you hated your first webdev internship. I would have hated it too. On a side note (making specific reference to the document instead of the comment!), I really enjoyed point #3. This speaks very much to the often short-lived A/B testing of low-volume AdWords text ads. The data is often ALL over the place despite the (otherwise) "professional" use of the platform. |