Originally published on the Optimizely blog in 2016. Republished here with less waffle, fewer Telegraph PR edits, and some hindsight. In 2016, newspapers were in freefall. In my first week working as the first in-house CRO at The Telegraph, I remember digging through Adobe Analytics and making a chart that felt very representative of the state of things: over the last few years, traffic referred…
The weekend markets live-ish and direct in my hand Update September 2025: I've rebuilt this as a cleaner, faster JavaScript widget that you can view here . A few years ago, I ended up spending 9 months living in South Gippsland, about two hours from Melbourne. We were doing a renovation on our house and had wonderful builders who took care of everything, so we left town for 9 months and left them…
Screaming Frog is a powerful SEO spider. You punch in a URL and it goes off and scrapes the site, cataloging the structure of the mark-up, finding 404s and broken links and otherwise identifying technical and content issues that might affect search engine visibility. I typically use it as a way to help diagnose on-site SEO issues en masse (no H1s, lots of H1s, missing META descripton, etc.) It's a…
People tend to have a unrealistic expectations about A/B testing. Vendors and agencies alike would have you believe that experimentation platforms are magical money machines that turn button colours and copy tweaks into double-digit conversion rates increases. One highly resourced program I know of built its business case on a strike rate of 50%. Every second experiment they ran, they proposed,…
Heatmapping has become a standard part of the website optimisation toolkit. Full Story, Hotjar, Crazy Egg and umpteen other UX optimisation tools offer it as a part of their packages. It’s easy to get started, too. You install the script on your site, check back a few days later and... it's ready! You now have colour coded Rorschach aggregations of click activity. Where did people click? Where…
Scientific truth is meant to be beyond reproach. The idea that an experiment will produce the same results every time is a cornerstone of the scientific method. But science is in turmoil. Successive waves of scandal have cast a shadow over the legitimacy of scientific truth. Over the last fifteen years, dubious research methods, ‘data dredging’ and even outright fraud have emerged with alarming…
More than ever, I speak with businesses that have ambitions of setting up their own optimisation programs. They’ve heard the success stories, swallowed the hype and are ready to strap their conversion rate on a rocket to the outer reaches of the stratosphere. Most of the time, though, I have to break it to them that A/B testing is probably not the best solution. Running an effective A/B testing…
I've used Gmail both personally and professionally ever since 2004. It’s easy to take for granted now but Gmail was utterly revolutionary when it first landed. It eliminated spam, had practically unlimited storage and came with Google quality search. Coming from a unimelb.edu.au account overflowing with erectile dysfunction spam and a 25mb quota (you could neither send nor receive messages at the…
If you’re running more than one or two A/B tests a month, you need a prioritisation method. If you’re working with a team that’s bigger than just you, you need a prioritisation method. Actually, even if it’s just you, you need a prioritisation method. Why you need a prioritisation method Formal prioritisation helps you to avoid waste time and energy on low impact, high effort tests. It makes sure…
There are a lot of moving parts in an A/B testing program. You need to manage idea submissions, prioritise a backlog, manage design and development. Not to mention, keep all your stakeholders informed along the way. The problem with spreadsheets Not long ago the defacto standard was to use a spreadsheet as an organisational tracker, Optimizely still host a template on their site that you can…
Here's my copy of the book I’m a nut for David Ogilvy. I will happily read anything that he ever wrote. Whether it’s an agency wide memo from 1963 or a long copy ad for Rolls Royce, every time I read and re-read his work I learn something new. One of Ogilvy’s great mentors was the early 20th century ad man Claude Hopkins. Hopkins wrote the 1923 book Scientific Advertising which introduced the…
Update 08/10/21 I never actually meant to publish this post. I wrote a draft which somehow ended up getting published and then became the most visited page on this whole site! This post could certainly do with a revision, but here's a quick update: Five years later, our Nest is still going strong and has been mostly pleasurably and straightforward to use. Would I install it again? Probably not.…