What is an Experimentation Platform? Uses of Experimentation Platforms
Published on Dec 30, 2024
by Vijay Singh Khatri
Every business requires constant changes and updates to stay on par with the ongoing technologies and match customers' needs. It is possible to gain higher revenues and increase leads by doing this.
To achieve this, it is necessary to decide upon strategies and perform experiments.
Experiments are designed to gain solid data to analyze the result of a change. This helps to avoid guesswork and means you can rely on credible statistics and information.
Therefore, experimentation can be a high value part of your business strategy. Many companies follow this approach and test to constantly improve their websites and apps. However, only few of them experiment systematically and efficiently.
What is an Experimentation Platform? Experimentation is the gold standard to test the performance of your website and execute appropriate changes. It helps to curate scientifically-valid experiments to understand the effect of proposed changes to analyze customers’ behaviour. Furthermore, managing many experiments within an experimental framework becomes easy and feasible.
You gain additional benefits that comprise monitoring the performance live, comparing testing approaches, and analysing what drives the website's performance.
Good experimentation requires the healthy and efficient collaboration of teams such as data science & analytics, engineering, design, marketing, CRM, etc.
In addition, various experimentation platforms provide you with tools and techniques. Such tools help perform experiments and boost revenues by analysing issues and presenting solutions. Therefore, reliable and credible experimentation platforms can help with making this process easier and more beneficial.
The Experimentation Process
There are some essential steps in the experiment process followed by every experimentation platform. They are:
Design and review
Implementing the changes
Execution stage
Analyzing and decision-making
1. Design and review
The first step is to formulate an experiment design and document it, this is often called an experimental flight plan. This design plan consists of various objectives - What is the goal? How to plan it? And why are you implementing the change?
This document should be shared across all teams. It also involves effective planning with the help of mutual understanding and analysis. There are various elements to carry out tests on, such as:
Titles and headers: Changing the titles based on SEO research and analysis can create a difference. You can change the font size, color, style, etc.
Call-to-action: How do you make your CTA buttons most effective to enhance conversion rates.
Landing pages: Create different landing page versions, introduce them to customers, and record their responses.
Navigation: Navigation increases the engagement of users on your website. Hence, it's the most effective option to keep the customer on the page.
Images: Images play a prominent role in attracting users. It gives an overview of the page and products. There is an option to add alt image attributes that help in SEO.
Algorithms: Try curating new and effective algorithms for testing purposes.
Often, there may be several iterations in the planning process. However, these are essential to benefit from the most effective results.
2. Implementing the ideas
Implementation requires proper research and testing of new ideas. The entire team including engineers, designers, and business units must check in and analyse.
In addition, data engineers must ensure that variants of original pages are assigned to users in accordance with the strategy, metrics are measured, and the data is reaching the data warehouse. These experiments focus on several modular components of your website.
Following a structured implementation strategy makes it easy to put ideas in one place to achieve the desired results.
3. Execution stage
Following discussion, the team must apply the new ideas to real-time users and record the metrics. This stage is the actual test. It gives a detailed overview of whether customers adapt to the changes/variations. In addition, optimization and several guardrail metrics such as website loading speed are observed.
If any problem occurs during this phase, the experiment is stopped.
The execution stage shows the actual effects of your variations.
4. Analyzing and decision making
According to the experiment flight plan, the accumulated data is analysed by experimentation experts on the team. The experimental analysis indicates whether you should discard or implement the ideas on your website.
This stage juggles between analysis and decision-making. It is the final stage of the experimentation process, where the results are actioned.
Experimentation Platforms Used by Top Companies
Web companies and businesses mostly use evident experimentation platforms such as A/B testing. A/B testing software provides businesses with more precise control over their experiments. However, large MNCs may inhabit massive experimentation programs. Therefore, these companies require platforms to handle a wide array of testing problems at once.
Uses of Experimentation Platforms
As mentioned previously, there are various steps in the experimentation process. Each step requires meticulous analysis and observation to find out errors. Efficient and credible experimentation platforms help check the process intricately and allow you to achieve pre-defined targets for your website.
The critical uses associated with a good experimentation platform comprise the following:
1. Quick results
With the help of experimentation platforms, you can speed up the process of testing. It further delivers actionable results for the elements with high user engagement. These platforms even cover short-order optimisation of sites, applications, and even low-converting pages.
The automated testing approaches, including implementing innovative techniques to fetch the best results, deliver quick results.
2. High user engagement and conversion rates
Testing various elements indicates the customer's behavior with your website. Often, the elements tested are landing pages, titles, images, CTA, algorithms, etc. The experimentation tools provide you with the most effective strategies to convert visitors into sign-ups and purchases.
This helps boost the conversion rates and achieve desired revenue targets for your business.
Using conversion rate optimization tools ensures that you are maximizing the potential of your website's traffic.
3. Efficient assignment of subjects
It helps in assigning subjects, such as users or sessions, to several variants. Doing so ensures that the same subject doesn't receive multiple variants.
Moreover, the platform helps maintain this assignment as long as testing continues. After that, it shifts the respective subjects to the assigned variants at run time.
4. Run the experiment at your convenience
The platform allows halting the experiment if any bug is reported or guardrail metrics indicate problems. This results in the quick address of issues and faster solutions.
Hence, there is the freedom to start and stop an experiment at your convenience.
5. Efficiency and effectiveness
It also brings effectiveness and efficiency in flight plans, decisions, and analysis. The planning process is highly optimized and provides ways to avoid sloppy analysis.
In addition, the tool also guides to implementation of the best ideas based on previous results.
6. Automatic analysis
The experimentation platforms help in the deep inspection and testing of experiments before launching or running them. It further automates the standard protocol analysis to skip p-hacking and early peeking anomalies.
7. Flexibility, Scalability, Robustness
These tools help boost flexibility, scalability, and robustness in your website. They help to increase the conversion rates and boosts revenues for your business.
Overall, experimentation platforms prompt companies to test and formulate new ideas to soar high. A credible experimentation platform instills the atmosphere of fast and innovative growth of a business.
Conclusion
If you seek to optimize your website and escalate your growth, experimentation platforms are highly recommended. Such tools give you a deep insight into the mechanics of website work and locate errors to give the best results.
Gaining traffic is an important goal for any website. But at times, no matter how significant the number is, traffic can’t lead to the expected conversion rates. This is where experimentation platforms come to the rescue. All the tools and techniques assist in the progress of a business, they present you with the most effective tools, methods, and automated techniques to optimise your website and gain results.