You Should Test That: Conversion Optimization for More Leads, Sales and Profit or The Art and Science of Optimized Marketing

I've been scouring the web for blogs on conversion optimization and website testing. It was frustrating trying to piece it all together. Don't take that route. This book is all you need to build a framework for building and testing pages. It was like the clouds were parting as I read each chapter. I've got like 20 sticky notes sticking out of this book. It's really great stuff.I love how Chris Goward writes as well. It's light and entertaining. There are lots of case studies along the way that really drive home his methodology with real world examples.Total 5-star recommendation.

This is a great book for anyone who wants to increase conversion rates on their digital properties. Chris does a great job explaining how important continuous testing is to driving continuous business improvement. He provides an approach that is simple to understand and makes a lot of sense. Anyone involved in Persuasion Marketing and User Experience Design will find A/B/n testing to be the final piece of the puzzle for business optimization. HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion)'s beware of the competition who embraces the integration of art & science in Merchandising & Marketing. Well Done Chris!

I've read every CRO-related book that is sold on Amazon. Until I picked up You Should Test That, all prior CRO books had to do with landing pages and how to improve them. While Chris does cover websites extensively in YSTT, he details the entire process of choosing what pages to test in the first place, what elements to test on those pages, and how to convince your superiors that CRO is a worthwhile activity. He makes a comprehensive business case for CRO, going beyond the usual ROI calculation, which is invaluable to the everyday Enterprise Marketer.

This book is essentially two things:1) An argument for why businesses should use a scientific approach to their marketing2) A long-form sales letter for Chris Goward’s marketing agencyIf you’re a marketer who already uses a scientific, data-driven approach and you’re experienced in running experiments and split-tests to guide your efforts, then you won’t get a ton of value out of this book.I read it hoping to get more ideas of things I should test — see if there are things I hadn’t thought to try yet. And I got a few! But not very many.I don’t hold it against Chris Goward that this book is essentially a sales letter for his agency, as there are hundreds of other marketing books that also are, but it may not be a valuable read unless your business needs a marketing agency. I’m sure his is great! It was clear in this book that he knows what he’s talking about. But I’m not as much a part of his target audience as I thought I was when I picked up his book.

I have been running controlled experiments for over 12 years now, at Microsoft, Amazon, and Blue Martini software, and have been involved in thousands of A/B tests. Hundreds of experiments run on our experimentation system at Microsoft on any given day, and I have written multiple peer-reviewed papers on online controlled experiments, available at exp-platform.Chris Goward's book was a pleasure to read, containing many gems, fun quotations, and cartoons, making what could have been a boring read into something enjoyable.It is clear that Chris and team at WiderFunnel have been involved in a lot of real scenarios, and share many real useful examples. They also give good references to resources. I enjoyed reading the book, and learned many new things.Why four and not five stars? Here are some downsides- The math/stats is not just lightly covered, but wrong in a few places. For example, "Data is collected until statistical significance is achieved" is a common theme throughout the book, which is misleading. An example from Section 5.1 (False Positives) of the paper "Online Controlled Experiments at Large Scale" shows that running five variants and testing them six times (e.g., each day the of the week the experiment runs as suggested) will result in over 50% chance of getting a stat-sig positive result with 95% conf intervals (1-0.975)^30 on an A/A test (when there is no true difference).Statements like "reached statistical significance" imply that once it is achieved, you remain stat-sig, which is not true.- The discussion of metrics is superficial and unclear. For example, "If you were to include multiple visits and pageviews for the same people, the conversion rate reported could be skewed too low." It depends what you are optimizing for and why. Are you looking to reduce the variance? Is it really the metric the business is optimizing?- Some statements are extreme, such as "Surveys and studies should never use percentages as findings unless their results arestatistically significant." The percentages with confidence intervals could be informative.- The selling of WiderFunnel to the reader could have been avoided and left as implied. For example, "If I were Walmart, I would hire WiderFunnel to test..."- The LIFT model is a nice conceptual model, but making claims like "Each person has a conversion tipping point, and the six conversion factors are both independent and cumulative" is much too strong. Do we now have a perfect six-factor linear separator for human decision making in the context of conversions?- No discussion on protecting the live site from egregious errors due to bad experiments. Chris writes"Once you’ve launched your test, do yourself a favor and take a break from watching the results for a few days."We operate in the opposite way: we watch the first hours of anexperiment carefully to detect egregious errors that hurt users in order to abort those experiments.If you're thinking about doing A/B testing and want some motivating examples, this is a great book to read.

I really enjoyed the book by Chris Goward. It is a great insight into how the Widerfunnel team performs conversion optimization and ab testing. The book was a really easy to read. Following the steps and case studies gave me some great ideas to start testing my sites right away.I also really like the sections on creating hypothesis using the LIFT model. Then the sections of optimizing for value, relevance and clarity were also well written. This book would be great for anyone interesting in learning conversion optimization or advanced ab testing practices.

This book is great for anyone involved in conversion optimization. If you are just starting out this book will give you a great foundation. If you already have an optimization program in place, this book will give you tools to make it better. There is lots of great info that you can implement quickly for quick wins. Its a fun book that's enjoyable to read too. Definitely a book to start or add to your collection!