statistics

The peeking problem: why sneaking a look at an A/B test inflates false positives

On 21 January 2015 Optimizely — one of the most widely used A/B testing platforms in the world — switched…

1 day ago

Regression to the Mean: the SEO Fix That Worked… by Accident

In the Israeli Air Force, Daniel Kahneman recounts, the flight instructors were sure of one thing: praising a cadet after…

2 days ago

A/B Testing: How to Run Statistically Valid Experiments (and the Mistakes to Avoid)

Over the previous articles we have looked at how hypothesis testing works and how the two-sample t-test lets us compare…

5 days ago

An Introduction to Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used statistical technique for reducing the complexity of large datasets. It aims to…

5 days ago

Correlation: Pearson, Spearman and Kendall (and Why It Isn’t Causation)

Anyone who looks at a website's data does it constantly, often without noticing: they spot that two things seem to…

5 days ago

Effect Size and Power Analysis: How Big Is the Effect (and How Much Data You Need)

We closed the article on the A/B test significance calculator with a promise. We said that the p-value answers a…

1 week ago

A/B Test Significance Calculator

Our A/B test has run its course: variant B shows a higher conversion rate than variant A. The temptation to…

2 weeks ago

The Statistics and SEO Library: the Books I Recommend (and Why)

There is a question that comes back, reliably, every time I publish an article along this path: "so, which book…

2 weeks ago

Simpson’s Paradox in SEO: When Aggregate Data Can Lie

It's the last day of the month. We're putting together the SEO report for our main client. We open Google…

4 weeks ago

Sampling and Sample Size: How Much Data Do You Really Need?

In this article: How to Choose Who to Measure: Types of Sampling Sample Size: The Math Behind the Estimation Let's…

2 months ago