#17 – Should You Copy Your Competitor’s A/B Tests

My name is Khalil Slade, and I.

Love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba, and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation, and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live, our podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Should you copy your competitors?

A B is I don't know if.

You'Re fully aware of all the AB.

Tests that your competitors are running. Sometimes easy, sometimes not easy. But I think a bigger question, a more important question. Should you copy some of the features that your competitors are running? That's an interesting concept. I know there is a standard in the industry where we say, no, just ignore competitors. I think that's being silly. So that's one extreme, and then the other extreme is, oh, let's copy competitors. And I've worked for companies that just copied competitors constantly and did not achieve any type of results. What you want to do is you want to look at your competitors and see features that you say, this might be interesting to test on our website. I might choose to take this feature and create an MVP version of it to test on my website. I might take it and say, you know what, for my particular client base, customer base, this is how I need.

To modify this feature so it works.

Better for the people who are coming to my website.

That's the approach that we take.

A little bit of competitive analysis never hurts. And it can guide. So the idea is not to copy, but to steal ideas.

Correct.

Let's steal some of the ideas. Let's modify them to work better for our market space. And sometimes your competitors might be just testing a feature out, they don't know, and you're copying them, you don't know, and something that might not work for them, they're testing it out, you might find out that it works really well for you. Data will only guide you. I think looking at what competitors do can inspire some research on your site to decide, oh, we should test this or we shouldn't test that.