Category Archives: Uncategorized

What is the value of my AB Testing Program?

Occasionally we are asked by companies how they should best assess the value of running their AB testing programs. I thought it might be useful to put down in writing some of the points to consider if you find yourselves asked this question. With respect to hypothesis tests, there are two main sources of value: […]

| Leave a comment


Do No Harm or AB Testing without P-Values

A few weeks ago I was talking with Kelly Wortham during her excellent AB Testing webinar series.  During the conversation, one of the attendees asked if they just wanted to pick between A and B, did they really need to run standard significance tests at a 90% or 95% confidence levels? The simple answer is […]

| 5 Comments


Thompson Sampling or how I learned to love Roulette

Multi-armed bandits, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, AI, predictive targeting blah blah blah. So many technical terms, morphing into buzz words, that it gets confusing to understand what is going on when using these methods for digital optimization.  Hopefully this post will give you a basic idea of how adaptive learning works, at least here at […]

| Leave a comment


Going from AB Testing to AI: Optimization as Reinforcement Learning

In this post we are going to introduce an optimization approach from artificial intelligence: Reinforcement Learning (RL). Hopefully we will convince you that it is both a powerful conceptual framework to organize how to think about digital optimization, as well as a set of useful computational tools to help us solve online optimization problems. Video […]

| 1 Comment


Machine Learning and Human Interpretability

The key idea behind Conductrics is that marketing optimization is really a reinforcement learning problem, a class of machine learning problem, rather than an AB testing problem. Framing optimization as a reinforcement learning problem allowed us to provide, from the very beginning, not just AB and multivariate testing tools, but also multi-armed bandits, predictive targeting, and a type of multi-touch decision attribution […]

Also posted in Analytics, Testing and Data Science | | Leave a comment


Conductrics 3.0 Release

Today I am happy to announce Conductrics 3.0, our third major release of our universal optimization platform. Conductrics 3.0 represents the next generation of personalized optimization technology, blending experimentation with machine learning to help deliver the best customer experiences across every Marketing channel. Conductrics 3.0 highlights include: Conductrics Express – You asked and we listened. While many […]

| Leave a comment


Segmentation and Shrinkage

In our last post, we introduced the idea of shrinkage. In this post we are going to extend that idea to improve our results when we segment our data by customer. Often what we really want is to discover what digital experience is working best for each customer.  A major problem is that as we segment […]

| Leave a comment


Prediction, Pooling, and Shrinkage

As some of you may have noticed, there are often little skirmishes that occasionally break out in digital testing and optimization. There are the AB test vs multi-armed bandits debate (both are good, depending on task), standard vs multivariate testing (same, both good), and the Frequentist vs. Bayesian testing argument (also, both good). In the […]

| Leave a comment


Easy Introduction to AB Testing and P-Values

UPDATED: 5/20/2021 A version of this post was originally published over at Conversion XL For all of the talk about how awesome (and big, don’t forget big) Big data is, one of the favorite tools in the conversion optimization toolkit, AB Testing, is decidedly small data. Optimization, winners and losers, Lean this that or the other […]

Also posted in Analytics, Testing and Data Science | | 2 Comments


Predictive Targeting: Managing Complexity

Personalization, one to one, predictive targeting, whatever you call it. Serving the optimal digital experience for each customer is often touted as the pinnacle of digital marketing efficacy. But if predictive targeting is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it right now?   The reason is that while targeting can be incredibility valuable, many in […]

Also posted in Analytics, Testing and Data Science | | 3 Comments