Removing Friction Across The Web—Our Investment in Experiment Engine
By Eric Paley
Google experimented with 41 different shades of blue for the ad links in its search results and found the exact hue statistically most likely to make people click, #2200CC, which resulted in an extra $200 million dollars in revenue. Amazon is rumored to run over 200 tests like this on their homepage, per day, scrutinizing each word and every button’s placement on the page down to the pixel. A single change in the checkout flow of Amazon is reported to have made the company an additional $300 million dollars a year. Removing friction for customers can add up to huge dollars for web companies. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have the design and engineering bandwidth of Google or Amazon to obsess over and test every detail.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce our investment in Experiment Engine, which offers a turnkey service that allows any company to benefit from the same type of A/B testing processes deployed at Amazon and Google. Experiment Engine utilizes automated tools paired with a community of optimization experts to create fully deployable tests at whatever speed a customer desires, without requiring any internal development or design resources. Whether a company needs help refining their landing page or working out the kinks in a shopping cart, the Experiment Engine platform executes solutions to drive optimized conversion. Their platform is being used by companies with world-class optimization capabilities, but limited bandwidth to run tests, as well as companies with less optimization experience, but the desire to remove customer friction.
In a perfect world all companies could establish processes where this type of experimental optimization would run non-stop without draining internal resources. As each test proved to increase signups or sales, it would seamlessly become the new control version of the page and new tests would begin. The faster tests could be deployed and proven successful, the faster the company would learn and benefit. Experiment Engine enables that vision. In concert with other gold standard tools like Optimizely, we believe startups will use Experiment Engine to massively accelerate their learnings and shorten the cycle time to performance improvements just as Amazon and Google do. Jeff Bezos said “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness” and Experiment Engine makes accelerating that inventiveness much less expensive.
Experiment Engine's founders, Claire Vo and EJ Lawless have spent their careers helping companies optimize and as experts in the field of Conversion Rate Optimization, their mission is to make this type of sophisticated experimentation accessible, and scalable, for web companies of all sizes.
We're honored to invest in Claire and EJ’s experiment to help the web perform better for everyone.