The Next Web is a technology publisher, we publish 24/7 news around business, technology and culture. We reach over 6 million unique users on a monthly basis currently which generates over 12 million pageviews. Next to that do we organise The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam and New York City with yearly over 5000 attendees. In the last 12 months we made huge progress in our digital marketing & analytics efforts. We grew our marketing team from 3 marketers to 15 currently, and we’re still expanding. With this we had the opportunity to hire a web analist which who I could work with to professionalize and scale our testing program to the next level.

1. #opticon2015
Scaling The Next Web’s Testing
Program to Maximum Impact
Martijn Scheijbeler
Lead Growth, SEO & Analytics - The Next Web
@martijnsch
martijn@thenextweb.com

2. Yearly 5.000 attendees, 75.000 products sold.
Monthly 6 million unique users, 12 million pageviews.
The Next Web: 2006 > 2015

4. What’s happened in the last 12 months?
Scaling our testing program

5. That clearly wasn’t good enough
1 test a month :(

6. Currently 5-6 tests a week, how did we get there?
15-20 tests a month :)

7. What did we learn along the way?
• Swim lanes, KPIs, Goals.
• Segments: traffic sources, etc.
• Idea creation: backlog + prioritisation.
• Scaling > Analysing results.
• Do it live!

8. Unique Users, Page Views, Emails & Revenue.
Goals: UU, PV, Emails & $
Related stories, pagination, sharing, email signups.
KPI: CTR, Engagement, Funnels

9. New v.s. Returning - Europe v.s. USA - Facebook v.s. SEO - Mobile v.s. Desktop
Type, Regions, Source, Device

10. Idea creation v.s. Planning
• Different templates + segments.
• How much time per test? Run tests for a fixed predefined time.
• The maximum of your program.
• Take away: create a backlog!

11. The part that we can’t scale yet

12. Analysing > Scaling!

13. Well, this is both the most boring and most exciting part!
1-2 main KPIs, 15 secondary KPIs

14. Rails, Google Analytics API
Built with love by the TNW Marketing team.
TNW Analytics

15. TNW Analytics was born!

16. Adding a new idea

17. Schedule

18. Test

19. Saving 20% of time per test!

20. Take away: Be able to push code!

21. What’s next?

22. Scaling our testing program to the next level?
• Even more templates, across more projects.
• 25+ tests a month with current growth of traffic.
• Bigger team? We can’t keep up with coding ;-)
• More automation? Push test variant to GTM.
• Mix it up with personalisation/ behaviour.
• Push our experiments to Slack for sharing.
• Create a better style guide + Bootstrap guidelines.

23. Summary & Take aways
• Know your KPI framework, expectations and limitations.
• Know your segments, CR% so you know how to prioritise.
• Follow your planning, priorities.
• Scale = 40% - 50% automation: analyse fast!
• Be able to push code live!

24. #opticon2015
Have fun & Thank you!
Martijn Scheijbeler
Lead Growth , SEO & Analytics - TNW
@martijnsch
martijn@thenextweb.com