Building an all new A/B testing tool?

Since the earliest days of Effective Experiments, way back in early 2014, we have constantly been asked this question by customers and companies interested in our platform.

“Will you ever create an A/B testing tool within Effective Experiments”

Today, I want to give you some news about this and I can firmly and definitely say

NO!

Effective Experiments is not developing or launching an A/B testing tool

There are many reasons behind this.

Firstly, our aim was never to create a testing tool but to help companies and agencies grow and scale their optimization programmes. We wanted our focus solely to be on creating an experience that encouraged our end users to get in the habit of documenting their learnings for future benefit so they could get quick insights about their AB tests, their ideas & conversion research. Knowing their experimentation history could help them understand the return they were getting on the effort they put in.

This was missing in the market when we first launched in late 2014 to a handful of guinea pigs  beta users.

Our efforts are aimed towards helping customers migrate from their existing and inefficient systems like trello, google sheets, jira and excel which were not purpose built for the optimization process. Often used in conjunction with one or two together, this constant jumping between tools causes a drain on productivity, effort and time, which could be better spent doing more CRO research and running more experiments.

Our platform was intended to be an all-in-one solution that allowed users to use Effective Experiments as a conversion optimization command centre for the entire CRO process – research, ideation, hypothesis & prioritisation, experiment development through design, qa and launch and finally reporting.

The CRO process for conversion optimization
Original image credit: acquireconvert.com (updated by Effective Experiments with blue boxes)

So why not add an A/B testing solution into the mix and really make it an all in one CRO project management and workflow tool?

Honestly, there are way better and more robust solutions out there and we wouldn’t think it would be useful for us to throw our hat in the ring to compete with well established players like Optimizely, VWO, Sitespect etc.

Our aim is solely customer focussed. We know that customers use a variety of testing tools, which they have been using for years and have been satisfied with. So why rock the boat and push a solution that may not be as robust or advanced than whats on the market? Doing so also spreads us thin. Trying to be a jack of all trades means that the outcome is mediocre at best. We want to be the best CRO workflow tool out there.

We have integrated with a lot of testing platforms and 3rd party tools for a seamless experience that allows our users to tie their ideation and hypotheses to the tests they run in the testing tool and ultimately get ready made reports and insights. We remain tech independent. When Optimizely purchased Experiment Engine, a competitor of ours, we were approached by other testing vendors asking if we wanted to sell to them.

However, doing so would be against our mission.

OUR MISSION IS TO HELP COMPANIES GROW THEIR OPTIMIZATION PROGRAMME BY INCREASING COLLABORATION & IMPROVING THE EXPERIMENTATION MINDSET IN THE COMPANY CULTURE

So to summarise –

We’re not developing an A/B testing tool to compete with the existing tools our customers already use. Instead, we will continue working towards being the main point of reference – a repository of insights and experimentation knowledge for ambitious high growth potential optimization teams and agencies.

INTERESTED IN SCALING UP YOUR TESTING PROGRAMME?

TALK TO US AND SEE HOW OUR PLATFORM CAN HELP YOUR COMPANY’S EXPERIMENTATION PROGRAMME GROW
www.effectiveexperiments.com

Manuel da Costa

A passionate evangelist of all things experimentation, Manuel da Costa founded Effective Experiments to help organizations to make experimentation a core part of every business. On the blog, he talks about experimentation as a driver of innovation, experimentation program management, change management and building better practices in A/B testing.