For every minute that you spend online, whether it’s adding a new pair of jeans to your shopping cart, browsing the web for good restaurant reviews, conducting online research for an assignment or paper, or casually scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed, you are in fact, constantly participating in an online social experiment. Perhaps you are aware of the fact that your online behaviour is being tracked and scrutinized by advertisers through the use of cookies, but how about the ability of companies to monitor things like where your mouse lingers, the time it took between clicking one photo and the next, and whether you tend to favour certain colours more than others when purchasing a product? In e-marketing and business intelligence, this is called A/B testing.

Knowledge is power, and the more you know about your customers, the more powerful your next marketing campaign will be. A/B testing can be a powerful tool to measure and compare the effectiveness of two different versions of the same variable, such as an advertisement or a call-to-action icon. Could the difference between a click, or a sale, be as simple as using a more appealing colour, shape, or word? As discussed in class, there are a variety of websites (ex. Optimizely) and software that can assist companies with conducting A/B testing on their own websites and users. Ultimately, this insightful marketing tool can help companies maximize their online presence, influence, and user experience, and by extension, contribute to increased sales and customer satisfaction.

From an online business owner’s perspective, A/B testing is a godsend. But how about for the consumer? Knowing that companies are getting into our heads, emotions, and behaviours through digital marketing and experimentation, I’m not sure I feel the same way.

Photo: http://www.wakefly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/A-B-Testing-With-Google-Experiments-Blog-Graphic.png