Launching an eCommerce Growth and Experimentation Program is a challenging task. Although it can have a significant impact on your business, many things can go wrong quickly, such as:
In short, you risk investing thousands of dollars in areas that don't impact the bottom line.
While you can't eliminate risk entirely, here are 10 elements to include in your Growth Program to boost your chances of success:
An effective growth and experimentation program must set a North Star Metric. According to MixPanel's blog, Signals & Stories:
"A North Star metric is meant to be a guide. It’s a compass pointing you in the right direction and keeping you focused on your primary goal of company growth and success based on what makes your customers happiest and keeps them coming back for more."
This metric links the value your customers get from using your product to your revenue. For example:
You might ask, "Why not use revenue instead?" Long-term revenue is only part of the picture. By focusing solely on revenue, you might miss other important objectives. As Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, states:
"Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one. Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by a core ideology—core values and a sense of purpose beyond just making money. Yet paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the purely profit-driven companies."
High-quality data has two key aspects: it should be complete and trusted. Initially, tracking visitors and conversion rates might suffice. However, as your program matures, you need to capture more metrics like revenue, cost of goods sold, customer IDs, and return rates. This enables you to:
Trust in your data is crucial since most of your decisions will be based on it. Ensure that events fire correctly, the DataLayer captures all the data, and your team knows how to use the analytics platform. Discovering errors can erode trust in the results and complicate future efforts.
Running tests and strategies without research is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. Your growth strategy and experiments should be informed by in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis. Essential methods include:
This approach increases your chances of success and enhances the effectiveness of your actions.
In his book Range, David Epstein showed that labs with diverse scientists were more likely to produce breakthroughs. The same applies to growth teams. Include members from:
Each member brings their unique experience, leading to original, high-potential ideas.
While having a wide range of ideas is great, time and money are limited. A tested prioritization framework helps rank ideas and focus on those with the highest chance of success. Popular frameworks include PIE, ICE, or PXL, but you can create your own as you gain experience. If you’re starting, the ICE Score is simple and intuitive. It ranks ideas based on:
This is likely the most important element of a Growth Program. As experiments and ideas progress, store your results on a centralized platform.
This allows your team to see what worked (and what didn’t) and use this data to inform future experiments.
Centralized learnings also benefit teams like Paid Ads and UX, improving their decisions based on actual customer behavior.
Few know that Jeff Bezos wasn’t the inventor of Amazon Prime; it was a junior software engineer. However, Bezos created a bottom-up communication channel that allowed ideas to reach the top.
Breakthrough ideas can come from the most unexpected places, so build systems to capture and foster them.
Building a culture of experimentation throughout the organization is crucial.
The Growth team should share successful experiments, roadmaps, and lessons, generating excitement about ongoing work.
The true power of experimentation emerges when exponential growth kicks in. And that's only possible when you retain the positive effects and discard the negative ones. If this discarding process doesn’t occur, the positive and negative impacts end up neutralizing each other.
The challenge is that it’s not easy to distinguish the experiments that produced uplifts from those that didn’t. Unless the impact is obvious, many external factors can cloud the data. This is where A/B testing comes in.
Randomized controlled experiments (aka A/B Tests) help you isolate one variable—the change you are introducing—to analyze its impact on the business.
In this way, you can be (almost) sure if your idea is producing positive or negative results.
But why exponential?
Simple.
Each positive experiment builds on the previous ones, compounding the effects.
In essence, they don’t just add up. They multiply!
So, don't shy away from A/B tests—they are an invaluable tool in your growth arsenal.
Do not take this pillar for granted. Statistics is complex, and someone on your growth team needs to have a deep understanding of it.
Without this expertise, you risk making decisions based on faulty interpretations, potentially losing millions and slowing growth.
Concepts like peeking, false positives, false negatives, false discovery rates, and non-binomial analysis should be common knowledge.
Ensure that the team you build or the agency you hire is proficient and honest.
Growth Ideas Fail More Often Than They Succeed.
And that's NORMAL.
The reality is that the nature of our work is uncertain.
At first glance, it's almost impossible to know for sure what will work and what won't.
We can create hundreds of reports in GA4, spend hours interviewing clients, and have the most detailed prioritization method.
This reduces the risk of failure and gives a solid foundation to our hypotheses.
But it will never guarantee the success of our experiments.
The solution is to learn to accept failure and take it as part of the process.
If our ideas are based on research and creativity, it's only a matter of time before one of them hits a home run.
Because many times you only need one to reach the next level.
Growth and Experimentation is hard.
But you are making it harder by not integrating these 10 elements into your program.
If you want to learn more about how you can launch or improve your Growth and Experimentation Program, reach out to me.
