More Data, Less Anxiety

Josh Pollock - February 03, 2016

There are a lot of ways my business causes me anxiety. This is an unescapable part of being an entrepreneur.

The biggest inducer of anxiety is decisions with no clear answer. Nothing makes this happen more than when trying to figure out the best way to describe my product.

I have a few different slogans I use for Caldera Forms, and I’ve never been sure what was the best one to use. It’s a source of constant worry for me if I’m using the wrong one, or if it doesn’t matter at all.

One slogan is descriptive, one says it’s different and one says it’s easy.
I’ve spent a lot of time debating over which one is best and I can make a good case for each. Without any data, I can’t know for sure, and honestly it’s been driving me a bit nuts.

Split Testing FTW

ingot-logoSo, the other night I installed Ingot, on CalderaWP.com and started testing the three slogans. I’m using the new “destination test” feature we added in the last version. This allows me to drop a shortcode into my content, where I normally would use the slogan, and track a conversion when a product is added to the cart.

I might find that the slogan has no effect on conversion rate. Honestly, finding out that I was worried about the wrong thing would be just as valuable. Only when I can eliminate one factor can I move on to testing others.

When you’re in business, you spend a ton of time worrying about all the possibilities, and talking to different people about the different options. That’s important.

So is taking a few minutes to set up an automated test to give you hard data to inform your opinion.

https://ingothq.com/ab-testing-in-wordpress-the-easy-way-just-got-more-awesome/

 

Problem, Solution, Repeat

Photo by: Stefan KunzeYour business should solve a problem that you have and are passionate about solving. Of course, it’s not a good business unless that problem affects enough people and they are willing to pay for it.

Ingot exists because I knew I need to so A/B testing for CalderaWP and I wasn’t happy with any of the solutions available to me. The tipping point for me was actually an experience with MailChimp’s A/B testing system.

In MailChimp I started setting up a test in one of my campaigns and then I realized I was pretty sure I had done that test last time, but then I needed to confirm that thought, which turned out to be true. Then when it came time to fill out the field I had tested the last time, I had to look up which variant had won.

I got a little annoyed — especially because after all of that, I had to deal with the anxiety that came with the fact that my list wasn’t big enough to create a statistically significant sample.

It was like every reason I didn’t use complicated A/B testing services for CalderaWP’s website. All of which were built for sites with may more traffic than we have.

That’s why Ingot is a thing. I finally have a simple tool to do A/B testing on CalderaWP’s site that is designed to work on lower traffic sites — we get about 6-7 thousand unique visitors a month.

Online marketer Josh is happy not to have time to do analysis on analytics and split test results. There is now a plugin do that automatically.

No one tell online marketer Josh how much time developer Josh spent making that possible:)