Increase Profits with Split Testing

Published on 27th September, 2007 by Stephen Lewis

Rarely does anybody get anything 100% right the first time. Frequently, people simply don’t notice that they didn’t get it right, because they didn’t get it wrong.

It didn’t break, people approved, it generated new sales, something positive happened, and we think to ourselves “well, that went well.”

When called upon to carry out the same task repeatedly over a period of time, we learn what works and what doesn’t through trial and error, and eventually arrive at something approaching the optimum solution.

Human Nature

This is how we approach most things. Presentations, working on an assembly line, cleaning the bathroom, relationships with loved ones, the list goes on.

It’s a pretty inefficient, haphazard way of getting good at a specific task, but it does a good job of getting us through the day within the larger context of our lives. In short, it’s our brain’s evolutionary response to everything the world throws at us.

Business requires a more systematic approach. Measuring what works, and making deliberate, incremental, measurable changes to discrete elements in the process.

Such a considered approach can have a very beneficial effect on business staples like ROI. Incrementally improving the first stage of a multi-step sales process (say, by increasing the response rate for an advert), can have an enormous knock-on effect.

The Science of Creativity

Of course, some people see this as being an awful lot of bother, despite the fact that it’s merely adding a degree of accountability into our natural trial-and-error approach. There’s also the suggestion, particularly amongst some designers, that such a rigid approach stifles creativity, and a lingering fear that it will lead inexorably to a (gasp) visually unsavoury end result.

Such people would do well to consider the following story about the Marx Brothers, who amongst their number included one of the most creative and enduring comedians in history – Groucho Marx.

Before shooting began for A Night at the Opera, the Marx Brothers took their fledgling script on the road, performing it in theatres across America, night after night. Before every performance they’d tweak and refine the jokes, based on past responses to the material, and then measure the results using audience laughter (or, rarely, a lack of it).

Groucho Marx in particular would agonise over every syllable, routinely trying out hundreds of variations of a single sentence.

Despite being released over seventy years ago, A Night at the Opera is still considered a comedy classic, probably the Marx Brothers’ finest film. In 2007 it was ranked eighty-fifth in the American Film Institute’s list of the Greatest Movies of All Time.