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About Cara Harshman:

Cara is a storyteller and journalist. From 2012-2016 Cara was a Content Marketing Manager and Blog Editor at Optimizely. She wrote A/B Testing the book on behalf of Optimizely’s co-founders. Follow her @CaraHarshman.

Why You Should Love the “Like” Button Redesign

By Cara Harshman
February 22, 2016
Why You Should Love the “Like” Button Redesign

One of the most iconic and frequently clicked buttons on the internet is getting a redesign. The Facebook like button that 1.6 billion users click more than 6 billion times per day is officially being replaced with six buttons to better capture the range of emotions we exhibit on Facebook — like, love wow, haha, angry, sad. If you’re thinking, OK…so what? think again, because this is huge. The way Facebook designed Reactions — their name for this new capability — demonstrates the magnitude of this change.

Growing Your Digital Agency With Optimization: An Optichat Recap

By Cara Harshman
February 3, 2016
Growing Your Digital Agency With Optimization: An Optichat Recap

As part of Digital Agency Day hosted by HubSpot and Unbounce, Optimizely hosted an #optichat Twitter chat to discuss how digital agencies can grow both their own and their clients’ business by offering optimization. We were thrilled to have some of the top optimization agencies in the world join the conversation and share their thoughts.

How to Run More Effective A/B Tests: An Optichat Recap

By Cara Harshman
December 2, 2015
How to Run More Effective A/B Tests: An Optichat Recap

Good ideas are the foundation of our work as optimizers. The source doesn’t matter — whether it comes from our heads, a user testing session or our website analytics — as much as the quality. Instead of one-off ideas, we need to equip ourselves with scalable strategies for brainstorming effective A/B tests. Hiten Shah, founder CrazyEgg, co-founder of KISSMetrics joined #optichat to discuss tactics for running effective A/B tests.

Here’s a recap of the questions, answers from Hiten and the #optichat community.

3 A/B Testing Case Studies on Seeking The Global Maximum

By Cara Harshman
November 9, 2015
3 A/B Testing Case Studies on Seeking The Global Maximum

As the following case studies reveal, there are huge wins to be had from thinking big and being open to questioning the status quo. There are also important revelations lurking in smaller tests that can point the way to a major redesign. And sometimes testing is the only way to find true north amidst the chaos and confusion of major changes.

#optichat Recap: Optimizing Black Friday & Cyber Monday

By Cara Harshman
November 6, 2015

The last weekend in November is the biggest shopping weekend of the year -hands down. The competition during this weekend is extremely high, and many retailers are unsure of how to optimize their customers’ experiences. We hosted a Twitter chat with online retail experts to discuss what retailers can do to capitalize on high traffic from Black Friday and Cyber Monday and what pitfalls they should avoid during the holiday shopping rush. Our guests included Linda Bustos, author of the new ecommerce blog, Ecommerce Illustrated and Get Elastic, the ecommerce blog operated by Elastic Path.

Marc Andreessen Talks Killer Robots, Unicorns, and The Future of Tech

By Cara Harshman
August 20, 2015
Marc Andreessen Talks Killer Robots, Unicorns, and The Future of Tech

Few folks on the planet are as recognized for thinking about the future as Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)* and one of the world’s most prolific venture capitalists by number of investments. Marc likes to discuss the future. A lot.

So it was fitting for our Co-founder and CEO, Dan Siroker to invite Marc to discuss the future of technology, privacy, and disruption at Opticon, our annual user conference.

Here are the 5 quotes from Marc’s conversation with Dan that really captivated the attention of the audience and gave them a birdseye view of how Marc sees the world evolving.

Case Study: Testing Personalized Experiences at Secret Escapes

By Cara Harshman
June 2, 2015
Case Study: Testing Personalized Experiences at Secret Escapes

This is part two of an optimization case study with Secret Escapes, a flash-sale luxury travel company. In part one we covered how Secret Escapes used Optimizely to experiment on their iOS app onboarding flow, double signup rate, and generate positive ROI from paid mobile marketing.

In this post, we’ll dig into another series of experiments that are driving continual increases in new user signups and revenue. In both experiments, Secret Escapes is testing the impact of personalized experiences.

How Secret Escapes Increased LTV and Doubled Signup on Mobile

By Cara Harshman
May 27, 2015
How Secret Escapes Increased LTV and Doubled Signup on Mobile

Secret Escapes is a flash-sale luxury travel company that offers discounted deals on four and five-star hotels around the world. The business is growing quickly with 300% YoY growth, expanding to markets in Germany and the U.S. with a base of 10 million+ members on their iOS/Android apps and website.

As a high-growth business in the extremely competitive online travel market, Secret Escapes cannot afford to make changes to any of their digital properties that might throw off this momentum. That’s why Secret Escapes runs all app and website changes—no matter how small—as Optimizely experiments first before rolling them out live.

What Marketers Can Learn From Slack’s CMO

By Cara Harshman
May 26, 2015
What Marketers Can Learn From Slack’s CMO

Slack is on fire. The company has record-setting growth metrics. It is adding $1 million dollars of ARR every 11 days. As of April 2015, over 750,000 people use the team messaging app daily. The entire story looks quite impressive on charts. And it looks equally impressive through the eyes of Bill Macaitis, Slack’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Marketers can learn a lot from Slack’s approach to marketing, especially their laser focus on creating the highest quality user experience possible — and measuring it. I’ll share a few lessons marketers can takeaway from Bill’s AMA.

Lessons on A/B Testing and Beyond from SXSW Interactive 2015

By Cara Harshman
April 8, 2015
Lessons on A/B Testing and Beyond from SXSW Interactive 2015

South by Southwest Interactive was good to the growth marketer this year. Sessions at this mega-conference/party are a gamble — there are so many to pick from so some inevitably turn out to be fluff while others exceed your wildest expectations.

In this post, I’ll share insights from a few of the growth marketer sessions I attended.

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