What do you think?
Rate this book
A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers
How Your Business Can Use the Science That Helped Win the White House "Dan and Pete are changing the way business is done and decisions are made. By pulling together concrete examples of how A/B testing has made an impact, they are inspiring a new generation of companies to make thoughtful, data-driven decisions. Their new book is smart, valuable, and proves just how indispensable A/B testing is today."
—MARISSA MAYER, CEO of Yahoo! "Finally, a book on A/B testing and digital optimization that I will eagerly hand out to my clients! It's approachable, not overly technical, and is actually full of real-world examples of testing in action that provide the inspiration for testing that is so badly needed in most companies."
— CALEB WHITMORE, founder and CEO, Analytics Pros; coauthor of Performance Marketing with Google Analytics "A practical and readable guide to get the most out of your online marketing tests. Get it before your competitors do!"
— Tim Ash, CEO, SiteTuners; bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization ; and chair of Conversion Conference "Here's the secret to magnificent marketing 1. Create a hypothesis. 2. Test it. 3. Be less wrong! In our immensely complex business world, if your organization is not structured to be less wrong every day, your failure is guaranteed. Ready to be less wrong but don't know how? Let Dan and Pete teach you!"
— Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 ; Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google "Savvy marketers have long known that A/B testing is a great way to optimize marketing and generate more revenue. But for too long, it has been considered too hard and complicated for most marketers to use. A/B The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks into Customers shows marketers at all levels of experience why testing is important—and more importantly, it gives them step-by-step guidance on how to get started and get the best results. I'm giving copies of this to my entire team, and I recommend you do as well!"
— Jon Miller, cofounder and VP of Marketing, Marketo "A/B testing that is fast and simple is set to disrupt web measurement and analytics on a massive scale. Every company should be using A/B testing to continuously improve, and anyone who wants to lead the charge on this revolution within their organization will benefit from reading this book."
— Amy Chang, former Global Head of Product, Google Analytics "Much like the prescriptive writing guide The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, A/B Testing is simple in its construction and design, but deceptively powerful and comprehensive in its message and breadth. This book is sure to be the foundational and prescriptive guide to optimization testing."
— Khai Tran, Senior Manager, Product—Online Video Products & Platforms, Disney/ABC Television Group
—MARISSA MAYER, CEO of Yahoo! "Finally, a book on A/B testing and digital optimization that I will eagerly hand out to my clients! It's approachable, not overly technical, and is actually full of real-world examples of testing in action that provide the inspiration for testing that is so badly needed in most companies."
— CALEB WHITMORE, founder and CEO, Analytics Pros; coauthor of Performance Marketing with Google Analytics "A practical and readable guide to get the most out of your online marketing tests. Get it before your competitors do!"
— Tim Ash, CEO, SiteTuners; bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization ; and chair of Conversion Conference "Here's the secret to magnificent marketing 1. Create a hypothesis. 2. Test it. 3. Be less wrong! In our immensely complex business world, if your organization is not structured to be less wrong every day, your failure is guaranteed. Ready to be less wrong but don't know how? Let Dan and Pete teach you!"
— Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 ; Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google "Savvy marketers have long known that A/B testing is a great way to optimize marketing and generate more revenue. But for too long, it has been considered too hard and complicated for most marketers to use. A/B The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks into Customers shows marketers at all levels of experience why testing is important—and more importantly, it gives them step-by-step guidance on how to get started and get the best results. I'm giving copies of this to my entire team, and I recommend you do as well!"
— Jon Miller, cofounder and VP of Marketing, Marketo "A/B testing that is fast and simple is set to disrupt web measurement and analytics on a massive scale. Every company should be using A/B testing to continuously improve, and anyone who wants to lead the charge on this revolution within their organization will benefit from reading this book."
— Amy Chang, former Global Head of Product, Google Analytics "Much like the prescriptive writing guide The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, A/B Testing is simple in its construction and design, but deceptively powerful and comprehensive in its message and breadth. This book is sure to be the foundational and prescriptive guide to optimization testing."
— Khai Tran, Senior Manager, Product—Online Video Products & Platforms, Disney/ABC Television Group
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
48 people are currently reading
649 people want to read
About the author
Dan Siroker
1 book52 followersDan the CEO and co-founder of Optimizely. The original inspiration for Optimizely came from his experience as the Director of Analytics on the Obama 2008 campaign. Prior to Optimizely, Dan served as Product Manager for Google Chrome and AdWords. Dan has extensive experience speaking about the benefits of A/B testing including guest lectures at Stanford and Berkeley business schools and keynotes at SXSW, SES, Conversion Conference, TheNextWeb, and dozens of others. He has also been featured on Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Wired and recognized by Forbes as Top 30 under 30 in Technology in 2013
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
October 5, 2017
In the intro to Lean Analytics, the authors admitted that they had difficulty convincing any startups to disclose their experiences as case studies for that book.
This book has the case studies (Obama 2008, Clinton-Bush Haiti, ABC Family, Lumosity, Formstack, Wikipedia, Cost Plus World Market, IGN, Etsy, and more) and is also better written and full of a lot more practical advice (including how to sell A/B testing within your organization), despite being a much shorter and faster read.
Highly recommended.
This book has the case studies (Obama 2008, Clinton-Bush Haiti, ABC Family, Lumosity, Formstack, Wikipedia, Cost Plus World Market, IGN, Etsy, and more) and is also better written and full of a lot more practical advice (including how to sell A/B testing within your organization), despite being a much shorter and faster read.
Highly recommended.
January 23, 2015
Unlike the few other business books I have read in my life this isn't just one chapter repeated over and over with a few simple word changes. The book actually does a great job helping people understand what A/B and multivariate testing are then moves on to explain the value proposition and provides valuable advice about how to get started and what to test.
I may be biased because I work at Optimizely, but I would be thrilled if all of our clients read this book before they started testing.
I may be biased because I work at Optimizely, but I would be thrilled if all of our clients read this book before they started testing.
August 1, 2018
This is not a technical book instructing you how to do A/B testing. Instead, it is more like a career summary from an experienced professional. You may expect what A/B testing could do in various scenarios, what are the common mistakes, heart-breaking lessons and brilliant-ideas in his legendary A/B testing history. Still very insightful for a data scientist, product manger and even people who in charge of developing big strategies.
December 26, 2018
This is a light introductory book to A/B testing. It covers some organizational concerns that beginners should take note, and also covers lightly on some of the theoretical concepts of A/B testing. It highlights many (I don't think it's all, but I don't know what I don't know) of the issues and concerns of starting and executing A/B tests in any organization, and I think overall, for the amount of time that you will require to read this book, I think it's still worth the read (This is really a rather light book to me).
That said, this book doesn't go deep enough if you want to know more about the technical implementations of A/B testing. This is a conceptual book on A/B testing for managers. This isn't a statistics book, nor an technical implementation book.
Note that this book is written by people from Optimizely, which is a tech firm that helps organizations run A/B tests. Don't worry about any hard-selling of their products, because they were very mindful of their own biases view regardless of their own products, and hence, didn't do much of that. That said, I feel that their blog posts have more interesting (I mean in-depth) A/B testing content that interested people who take note.
That said, this book doesn't go deep enough if you want to know more about the technical implementations of A/B testing. This is a conceptual book on A/B testing for managers. This isn't a statistics book, nor an technical implementation book.
Note that this book is written by people from Optimizely, which is a tech firm that helps organizations run A/B tests. Don't worry about any hard-selling of their products, because they were very mindful of their own biases view regardless of their own products, and hence, didn't do much of that. That said, I feel that their blog posts have more interesting (I mean in-depth) A/B testing content that interested people who take note.
January 2, 2020
Practical and down to earth knowledge for A/B testing. However, I think this book is like a bunch of (successful) case studies which helps to highlight the importance of A/B testing (if you already knew it, well, this book is hardly valuable much).
Instead of reading this book, you can go and read lots of articles about A/B testing similar like this on internet as well. Still, a good and easy read.
Instead of reading this book, you can go and read lots of articles about A/B testing similar like this on internet as well. Still, a good and easy read.
April 28, 2019
The art of A/B testing is mentioned in a glance at this book. For a number guy who believes numbers and data can rule the world this book reaffirms and restores faith in the process of analytics. Especially the Obama campaign and the use of A/B testing in it roused my curiosity and quenched it too.
A good read and simple read and very useful if implemented in user experience facing products.
A good read and simple read and very useful if implemented in user experience facing products.
January 28, 2018
An absolute must-read for tech/internet professionals. Beginner level, but has lots of good examples, and the appendix allows you to dig deeper. List of tests and success metrics can be used as reference.
March 6, 2019
Short and concise cases.
A very good introduction to AB testing. Too much emphasis on political campaign and fundraising. Would love to see more in depth examples on how it works in big tech companies.
A very good introduction to AB testing. Too much emphasis on political campaign and fundraising. Would love to see more in depth examples on how it works in big tech companies.
November 6, 2019
This book was not nearly as technical and diving into the design of the experiments as I would have hoped. It's a light read. I finished it very quickly.
It is good for getting idea's on what types of A/B tests to run, but not necessarily for getting into the detail of how to do them.
It is good for getting idea's on what types of A/B tests to run, but not necessarily for getting into the detail of how to do them.
July 9, 2025
Some interesting real-life use cases of A/B testing! Overall, I’d give it 4 stars—if it weren’t for the minor DataViz slips like using line graph to visualize categorical data. Not exactly what you’d expect in a book on analytics. :)
June 1, 2017
All business books should be written this well. Would have appreciated a bit more detail in Appendix 2.
September 21, 2017
Loved it(: Yaaasss
August 26, 2018
Great introduction to A/B testing. This booked is packed with examples and explanations. It also talks about building a test culture in an organization.
August 20, 2019
Really basic stuff. As the stars say - it was ok. Nothing less, nothing more.
November 24, 2019
Basics . For beginners. Nice intro for A/B testing.
October 29, 2021
A must read for people in growth engineering teams.
Easy to read, full of ideas.
Easy to read, full of ideas.
November 7, 2021
Fifty-thousand view of what A/B testing is, why it is important, and how it is used by the likes of the Clinton-Bush foundation, ETSY, Chrome, IGN, and political campaigns.
Early on, the authors lay the ground rules and spend the rest of the book reinforcing their points through several relevant industry examples.
Read it if you need the basics and only the basics. Skip it if you need the nitty-gritty details.
Recommended!
Early on, the authors lay the ground rules and spend the rest of the book reinforcing their points through several relevant industry examples.
Read it if you need the basics and only the basics. Skip it if you need the nitty-gritty details.
Recommended!
August 30, 2016
I thoroughly enjoyed the book A/B Testing because it was to the point and a great overview of why you would want to do A/B testing, what A/B testing can tell you, and how to get started.
I work in social media and I completely understand how important testing website design is and how it can covert people into customers. This book is one that you could hand to someone who was interested in how this would work and how to get started.
I found that I liked the summations at the end of each chapter to go over what I just read and put it into just a few words. Also, I thought the examples given in the book made it easy to understand why and how they tested them. Especially, the example from the Obama campaign. That one was very interesting because of what the data told them.
Overall, this is an easy read and makes me want to learn more about A/B testing.
I work in social media and I completely understand how important testing website design is and how it can covert people into customers. This book is one that you could hand to someone who was interested in how this would work and how to get started.
I found that I liked the summations at the end of each chapter to go over what I just read and put it into just a few words. Also, I thought the examples given in the book made it easy to understand why and how they tested them. Especially, the example from the Obama campaign. That one was very interesting because of what the data told them.
Overall, this is an easy read and makes me want to learn more about A/B testing.
March 28, 2015
This book helps people understand why A/B testing is important, but as a UX designer who already has some A/B testing knowledge, 1/3 of the book is meant for beginners as it repeats stuff I already know. However, I like the examples/case studies. It's easy to understand with the visuals and impressive stats.
Of course, a book written by the authors of Optimizely is meant to sell you the product. Thus I find the book too biased, or you can say framed. For example, in Chapter 7 - Deciding which way to go for A/B testing, the description for using Optimizely is a lot longer with a list of benefits of their product. Also, the examples in Chapter 11 Avoiding Pitfalls, gives an example on Dell testing with off-brand colors, but the chapter just ends there without explaining the results and whether or not Dell found anything useful by testing color variants.
Of course, a book written by the authors of Optimizely is meant to sell you the product. Thus I find the book too biased, or you can say framed. For example, in Chapter 7 - Deciding which way to go for A/B testing, the description for using Optimizely is a lot longer with a list of benefits of their product. Also, the examples in Chapter 11 Avoiding Pitfalls, gives an example on Dell testing with off-brand colors, but the chapter just ends there without explaining the results and whether or not Dell found anything useful by testing color variants.
September 5, 2013
I received this book through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.
It's not often that I pick up a nonfiction book and find myself compelled to read it from the first few pages. But this book accomplished that. I was really struck by the logic of the author's thought processes and how his logic translated into practicality. I didn't agree with all of his points but overall I found this book to be a valuable read and I expect I will refer back to it in the future.
It's not often that I pick up a nonfiction book and find myself compelled to read it from the first few pages. But this book accomplished that. I was really struck by the logic of the author's thought processes and how his logic translated into practicality. I didn't agree with all of his points but overall I found this book to be a valuable read and I expect I will refer back to it in the future.
November 25, 2014
This book can be read in a day or two, but i think its simple message and clear illustration of how A/B testing is supplanting web design strategies is deliberate. Definitely worth reading, you will come away with a conviction that digital marketing is undergoing democratization, no longer the cloistered playground of consultants and creative agencies.
March 17, 2017
If you've never heard about a/b testing this is an ideal book for you.
It explains principles with lots of real-life examples
It explains principles with lots of real-life examples
August 11, 2016
I won this book free through Goodreads. I think that this is a great book for companies and businesses that need some help with marketing and needs to know how to attract customers to their business. This book gives you a step by step process on how to do it.
May 27, 2014
Only for very very beginners. Read it in 30 minutes. The cases are fun but nothing groundbreaking. A testament to the popularity of A/B testing, I suppose, that the book feels so obvious and dated so soon after publication.
January 18, 2015
Very good advice, one that in my business I try to do every 3 days. Split testing can make a ton of difference and looking back I regret I didn’t know of it in my previous 2 businesses. If you have visitors to a product, online or not, A/B testing is a concept you must use!
January 12, 2016
I learned some interesting things as I was reading the book. I would definitely recommend to anyone marketing online for their business. Received as an ARC.
October 21, 2013
This books is a great 101 for those just starting to A/B test components of website design. I highly recommend it.
June 3, 2014
Not a bad book at all. I enjoyed it and learned some new things about A/B testing.
January 17, 2015
Excellent introduction to the concept with concrete examples.
February 2, 2015
It is an awesome book for the starters in A/B testing
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews