Award Winning Blog - Agitator

TESTING: Go Beyond Individual Communications

When you want to find out if your control package could be beaten, you test a different communication against it. So how do you test if your direct marketing program could be better? Clearly, you test a different program against it. For some this is a scary thought: it’s hard enough to deliver on one […]

Learn More January 5, 2018

Does it hurt to ask (for feedback)?

You can hardly move today without being asked for your feedback. Over a year ago, I charted a week of feedback and found every transaction asked me for feedback except for a parking lot, a local Chinese restaurant, and an airline that stranded me in a city for a night without paying for my hotel […]

Learn More January 4, 2018

TESTING: When A/B Tests Attack (your results)

In yesterday’s post we talked about when A/B tests show results, but all that’s really there is noise. Today, we’ll flip that on its head: sometimes an A/B test shows no result, but there’s an important finding just below the surface. An example of this is a great study by Karlan and Wood looking at whether […]

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TESTING: Baby Steps are for Babies

(aka The Myth of Testing One Variable at a Time) After our earlier posts on the dangers of overly simplistic testing, you could despair of getting any legitimate test results for your file with noise in the data and large quantities required. There is, however, good news. If you embrace larger-scale testing, you can break […]

Learn More January 3, 2018

TESTING: BASKIN-ROBBINS CURES CANCER!

(aka The Myth of Statistical Significance) Get the Nobel Prize ready. I know Baskin-Robbins cures cancer in lab tests for a fact despite no medical training or testing. How can I be so certain? Because they have 31 flavors. If I ran a test of people who eat each flavor of Baskin-Robbins, it’s very likely […]

Learn More January 2, 2018

Happy New Year! A Great Time for a Fresh Start

Happy New Year and the best of wishes for 2018 from all of us at The Agitator. We’re going to forego the traditional “trends to watch for the coming year” in favor of the realization that in many ways 2017 has been a weird year and we’re pretty certain there won’t be much relief in […]

Learn More January 1, 2018