Getting Started With Your First Growth Experiments With Wowzers.

Written by Nick Brock

July 27, 2023

#BackToBasics

Marketing is hard. And it’s only getting more complicated.

A few years back, anyone could turn to digital ads to drive instant traffic to their site. But with the costs of online ads skyrocketing, they are increasingly becoming less effective and even uneconomical.

This means putting more energy into other marketing channels like content marketing, communities, SEO, and sales, to name a few. Channels that are long-burn and take time to deliver results. Time many business owners and entrepreneurs don’t have.

Don’t get us wrong. Online ads rarely work out of the box. But they allowed you to make and test small iterations rapidly. So you could go from poor to solid performance in weeks, not months.

Not so with many other marketing channels. Never was it more important to identify and prioritise high-impact ideas so that you can work on those most likely to move the money needle for your business.

But even when working on your best ideas, many will fail. Upwards of 80%. To ensure you’re moving forward, you must experiment with different channels, segments and variables. Crucially, you need to learn from every experiment.

Wowzers was built to do just that. Growth experimentation is one of several growth-centric methodologies integrated into Wowzers alongside Idea ranking and rating, OKRs and shortly, Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). In this article, we explore growth experimentation and how to get started with your first growth experiments in Wowzers.

NB: This article is intended as a top-level overview of growth experimentation, written as if we were explaining it for the first time to a friend. There are many in-depth articles on the subject, and we recommend reading those to broaden your knowledge of growth experimentation.

What is growth experimentation?

Growth experimentation, otherwise known as growth hacking or marketing experimentation, is a method for systematically testing your marketing activity. It’s all about finding what works for your business and what doesn’t, capitalising on your successes, and cutting your losses.

Rather than continuing in blind faith pursuing a particular channel or campaign, growth experiments help you kill underperforming activities quickly, so you take the learnings and invest resources elsewhere. In a nutshell, growth experimentation helps you:

#1 Test new marketing channels or campaigns.

Rather than go in all guns blazing, hoping your campaign will succeed, you take a more pragmatic approach and test the waters. Only if conditions are favourable do you ramp up activity.

#2 Improve conversion rates (CRO) of promising channels.

Once you’ve proven a particular channel or campaign is working, you can use growth experimentation to improve conversion, making incremental changes and testing how they perform against the status quo.

One important point to remember about Growth Experimentation is that once you launch an experiment, you should avoid the temptation to tweak it until the experiment concludes. Doing so can invalidate your results. The only exception is if the experiment is damaging brand or reputation.

Things to consider before running your first growth experiment.

Before running your first growth experiment, you must define what you are testing and why. Are you attempting something new? For example, a new marketing channel or targeting a new audience segment. Or do you want to refine an existing channel, for example, adding an upsell to your blogs.

You also need to decide how you’ll measure success. What metric will your experiment have the greatest impact on? And how great an influence should it have for the experiment to be deemed successful? This is termed the ‘metric that matters’ or ‘success metric’.

Next, you need to define the experiment budget. Some experiments require no budget, whereas budget can be a limiting factor for others. Benchmark expected costs in your industry so you know what you might need to spend. You don’t want your experiment curtailed because you exceeded the budget. At the same time, if the anticipated cost makes your eyes water, it might not be an experiment you should be running.

Finally, you need to define your experiment’s duration in order to obtain meaningful results. This depends on the channel and volume. As a general rule, experiments should run for seven days. Your budget must be enough to cover the experiment over its duration.

Running your first growth experiments in Wowzers.

Wowzers has dedicated functionality to help you run growth experiments and capture outcomes and learning. Growth Experiments can be run in conjunction with projects and shared with other teams. Here’s how.

#1 Switch cards to “Experiment”.

In the card header, you’ll find the “Experiment” icon. Clicking this loads the experiment blocks – Hypothesis, User Story, Success Metric, and Results – for you to document your experiment. We explore those next.

#2 Define your Hypothesis.

Whatever you decide to test, the first step is to capture what you are testing, why, and what you expect the outcome to be. This is a crucial step because not only does it help you define how to conduct the experiment, but it also captures your assumptions so you can see whether you are right or wrong. This is called your hypothesis.

In Wowzers, we have a dedicated Hypothesis block which provides a structured way to capture your hypothesis. It contains the following fields:

“We believe that…” [Why you are running the experiment.]
“To verify that we will…” [Experiment description.]
“And measure…” [Success metric. See below.]
“We are right if…” [Expected outcome.]
“The minimum viable experiment type is…” [Optional: List of 8 experiment types as defined.]
“The outcome led our hypothesis to be…” [Choose from “accepted” or “rejected”. Fill this in once the experiment ends.]

Don’t want to use this structure? Switch the Hypothesis block to free text and write whatever you like.

#3 Capture your User Story.

An experiment should target a particular segment or persona. The User Story block in Wowzers lets you capture your experiment’s target audience. It comprises three fields:

“As a…” [Who wants to accomplish something?]
“I want to…” [What your target audience wishes to accomplish?]
“So that I…” [Why your target audience wishes to accomplish that thing?]
Don’t want to use this structure? Switch the User Story block to free text and write whatever you like.

#4 Detail your Success Metric.

Here’s where you capture what metric you intend to influence with your experiment. Fill out the following fields so that all team members know what you are measuring, for how long, and who your target audience is.

The success metric is… [Choose from over 60 metrics or add your own.]
The traction channel is… [Choose from 20 traction channels.]
The baseline value is… [Enter the current value or zero if you’ve never tested it.]
It was recorded between… [Enter the start and end date from which the baseline value was recorded.]
The target value is… [ What you expect your metric to be following the experiment’s conclusion.]
The achieved value was… [The value of the metric once the experiment concluded. Wait to fill this in after the experiment ends.]

Don’t want to use this structure? Switch the User Story block to free text and write whatever you like.

#5 Get everything ready.

Hypothesis, user story and success metric documented? You’re ready to start preparing the assets needed to run your experiment. If you’re running an experiment around online ads, this could be an ad, offer (e.g. subscription) and landing page, or if you are testing a new sales outreach campaign, a series of emails, script and direct marketing piece.

You can deliver all this in the same card on Wowzers workflow boards. Capture everything that needs doing as todos and assign them to relevant team members or with other teams. (Wowzers supports cross-functional teams working in independent workflows). Once all todos are done and everything is tested, you are ready to launch your experiment.

#6 Run your experiment.

It’s time to put theory into practice. Publish all assets and let your experiment run for the duration specified in the Success Metric. Monitor results, but resist the temptation to tweak your experiment while running, or you will invalidate your results. You’ll no doubt find ways to improve on your experiment, but these should be tested in a future experiment.

#7 Capture your results.

Once the experiment ends, as defined by the experiment duration in the Success Metric block, complete the Result block and update both the Hypothesis and Success Metric blocks.
The Result block comprises three fields, namely:

Our experiment results in a… [Choose either “Win” or “Loose”. Consult the “Target Value” field in the Success Metric block to see what you anticipated to achieve in running the experiment.]
We propose to… [Choose from “persevere with our experiment”, “pivot”, or “kill our experiment” based on how close you came to achieving your target value and appetite for further exploration.]
We concluded that… [Document your learning and conclusions.]

In the Success Metric block, you want to complete the “The achieved value was” field based on the experiment’s outcome. Enter the final value of the metric on the day the experiment ended.

And finally, in the Hypothesis Block, choose between either “accepted” or “rejected” in the “The outcome led our hypothesis to be…” field. If your hypothesis was disproven by the experiment, reject your hypothesis. If you were right, accept the hypothesis.

Anything else I should know?

Successful experiments are identified on Wowers workflow boards by the trophy icon in the card header and card container in Kanban board view. If you choose to persevere, run further experiments based on your learnings. Create a new card in Wowzers and wash and repeat the above steps, incorporating lessons learnt.

Want to run your first growth experiment? Sign up for Wowzers, and we’ll get you’ll be experimenting in no time.

*Wowzers.io is the idea, goal and project management solution that helps busy business owners identify the activities that move the money needle. One tool for all your work and teams. Tried and tested on our own businesses. Learn more.