Startups Take A/B Testing Beyond Silicon Valley

Two new startups are putting a powerful online tool for increasing profits — once available only to big, high-tech companies — into the hands of smaller, less tech-savvy businesses. For customers, it may mean a future in which they're constantly acting as test subjects, even for the smallest $2 cellphone games or niche blogs.

Google is one of the best-known devotees of the tool, called A/B testing. In a Google A/B test, visitors to a Google site are randomly and automatically directed to one of two or more variations on the original webpage. The variations all have just one change in them. In 2009, the search company sent visitors to one of 41 versions of Google.com, each trying out a different shade of blue in its search bar. The blue that won was the shade that garnered the most clicks, and thus the most revenue, for Google.

A/B tests can apply to everything from individual webpages to ads to the difficulty of a level in a game. The tool helps companies and political campaigns maximize their revenues, but it's not as easy to deploy as it is to explain, as Wired reported in April. The companies that perform A/B testing often devote many programmers and statisticians to setting up the tests and analyzing the results. Longtime A/B testers tend to be big tech places, such as Amazon and Netflix.