A comparative chart of online testing waves

We’ve talked about the importance of cycles of iteration and innovation before, but now let’s talk about those cycles in terms of planning your actual test waves.  

Production Resources

Your production resources when iterating will be relatively low since you’re making minor changes. When you’re innovating those resources may be high since you’re creating new experiences to test.

Causation

When you’re iterating, you’re testing small changes against each other, which makes it easy to correlate a specific change to an increase in conversions. When you’re testing completely different experiences against each other (as is the case with innovation cycles), it will be hard to know exactly why one page beat the other. 

Speed to Market

Speed to market should be really fast for your iterations since you’re just changing an existing experience that is already live. Speed to market will be slower if you’re innovating because you’re launching a new experience. However, with the right landing page testing tool in place, even new experiences can be launched in minutes.

Type of Testing

When you’re iterating it may make sense to use multivariate testing since you’ll want to test different combinations to see what works best within a specific format. When you’re launching new experiences to test, first A/B/n test to see which experience is your champion, and iterate and optimize from there. 

LX (Landing Experience) Similarity

In the iterative cycle your landing experiences will be very similar to each other. You’ll simply be testing small changes or combination of changes on pages that are already converting well. In the innovation cycle your pages will be very different from each other since you’re trying to decide which type of experience visitors respond to better. 

Hopefully this chart will help you plan out your next test waves! For more information on online testing, download our Guide to Online Testing today!