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Unlike carousels on websites, PDP image carousels actually get used. Despite that, plenty of brands still underuse the space. Heatmaps and session recordings show people clicking through them, especially images 2-5, which is where they slow down to sanity-check details and decide whether to buy. Daphne Tideman wrote about the seven things to get right. 1. Hero image: make it clear what someone's buying, especially with bundles. If there's a free gift, show it upfront. 2. Mobile-first: about half the real estate above the fold on mobile is the carousel, so one message per image and text big enough to read. 3. Images 2-5 should answer decision questions: context of use, outcomes, proof, and detail. Each slide should earn its spot. 4. Don't copy-paste the same shot five times. The 17% lift Daphne saw came from rebuilding a near-identical-shot carousel into a structured one. 5. Adjust depth to the product. Wearables need angles, close-ups, and fit shots. Consumables need clear packaging, labels, and usage demonstration. 6. Trust builders work well, as long as you keep them simple. Studies, expert endorsements, and certifications all qualify, but stick to one clear point per image. 7. Short videos can help, if done right. Keep them 5-30 seconds, understandable without sound, and closer to a loop than a brand film. The carousel is one of the rare places on a website where shoppers will actually swipe through. It's worth giving them something useful when they do. Daphne's full article, with all the examples: convert.com/blog/growth-ma…

Funnels show you the neat paths you've designed. Process mining shows you the paths your buyers actually take. Nothing you find through process mining is business as usual. If you do it right, expect unexpected routes, points of fricton, and head-scratching drop-off patterns. Process mining is humbling. After all, it is about how "off" your carefully-crafted experiences are. But the good news is, process mining with A/B testing can reconcile this difference. Calling on the team of Alexandros Kakakis of Online Dialogue and Florien Cramwinckel, PhD for this Process Mining 101 session. They'll cover: 1. What process mining is 2. The signs that your company is ready to embrace process mining and the data you'll need access to. 3. Live walkthrough of an actual process mining project -- complete with the "we weren't expecting this" findings. 4. How to get started with process mining - even if you've never heard of it before! **Replay available. Join live to get the chance to win 5x Claude usage. PS: This session is part of our Growth Foundations series where we visit the fundamentals of good experimentation and decision-making that we can't afford to forget. us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

1 in 4 people in the EU needs accessibility support. Far fewer digital products are built with them in mind. That's 189 million people across the EU. Shirley van Haalem opens her talk at Women in Experimentation 2025 with the breakdown: 13 million with visual impairments, 34 million with dyslexia, and the 80% of disabilities that are invisible. She speaks from inside that group, running CRO experiments at significant zoom on her own screen because of her own low vision. A LinkedIn post with five emojis per line gets read out loud as "clapping hands, clapping hands, clapping hands, clapping hands, clapping hands" by a screen reader, then again on the next line. It's the detail you only notice if you've watched someone live with it. Accessibility is wildly underrated as a conversion lever. Shirley uses Online Dialogue's BOOM model and notes that "ability" (making behaviour easier) is the highest-uplift strategy across their experiments. Accessibility is just that, applied universally. The state of the web doesn't help. 95% of the top one million homepages have detected accessibility errors, averaging 51 per page. Today, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, that number is worth sitting with. Common issues include low contrast, missing alt text, and empty links, all of which are especially problematic for screen reader users. The starting move is small. You can run a free Wave Chrome scan on your site, test navigation using your laptop's built-in voiceover, or ask someone who isn't you to try the site cold. Shirley's framing on the difference: good accessibility is for compliance. Great accessibility is for empathy. The example we'll be quoting for a while: large click targets help people with limited dexterity, and people with long nails. Good accessibility is good design for everyone. Watch the full talk here: youtube.com/watch?v=NIZsBW…

Heatmaps come to Convert. The why behind any variation is now one click away. Three types of heatmaps are available: clicks, taps, and scrolls. Each can be filtered by device (desktop, tablet, mobile) and by variation (original or any you're testing against). Overlays render in real time on the actual page UI, not on a screenshot, so you're looking at the live experience users had. In practice, the workflow is: you run a test, you see which variation won, you open the heatmap, and you see the behaviour that explains the result. Maybe the winning variation pulled more clicks on a CTA that was buried below the fold on the original. Or the losing variation had users scrolling past the new section entirely. That kind of detail feeds straight back into the hypothesis for the next test. A side benefit: no more bouncing between Convert and a separate heatmap tool to figure out why a result landed the way it did. The behavioural data and the experiment data share a view. We took our time getting here, and it was worth it. Heatmaps now actually fit into the experimentation workflow instead of sitting next to it. It's available now to all customers.

54.8% of 18-24s now use TikTok over Google for search. Chantel Jordan's take on the latest SearchPulse data. Chantel pulled out the data points that actually matter for CRO, and reframed them through three sharp lenses: Principle of Least Effort: users go to AI because it removes friction. 61.2% value ease of use, 56.9% prioritise quick results. The goal is faster answers, not deeper thinking. Authority Bias: Perplexity users trust the platform 60% of the time. ChatGPT trust sits at 43%. Specialist AI is winning on authority, not scale. Trust Paradox: 35% don't fully trust AI answers, and 41.5% would trust a brand LESS for advertising inside an AI conversation. Paid attention inside AI breaks the relationship. The takeaway for CRO teams: the new job is to become the source AI models cite, not to sit at the top of a paid placement. Move from selling to proving. convert.com/blog/optimizat…

Best In Test 2026 happens June 10. Free seat on Zoom, plus an hour of the year's most rigorous A/B tests. It's run by GuessTheTest, with Convert.com co-hosting and EchoLogyx Ltd as technical sponsor. Five awards go out across two tracks. On the A/B testing side: - Gold for the most statistically rigorous experiment - Silver for high-impact methodology excellence - Bronze for innovation that moves needles For the educational content track: - Education Impact Award for framework-focused content creators - Community Contribution Award for high-impact methodology excellence The prize stack for the A/B testing track: First Place: iPhone 17 (256GB) Second Place: iPad 11th Gen Third Place: AirPods 4 with noise cancellation Every winner also gets a GuessTheTest Annual Pro Membership ($497 value). Educational content winners pick up extras: a custom eco-friendly plaque, 60 days of Convert ($800), and $250 in Claude tokens. The whole pool tops $5,000 in value, plus spotlight features across GuessTheTest and Convert for the winners. Wednesday, June 10 at 11 AM Eastern. Register free: guessthetest.com/the-best-in-te…

London 2026 wrapped: three events, two weeks on the ground. Here's what stood out. 1. Women in Experimentation meetup This one was a proper sit-down dinner rather than a stand-up networking thing. You actually finished sentences with the person next to you. A couple of the threads from the table are still running in our heads. 2. Convert Quests at the Experimentation Elite We ran a treasure hunt during the Ex Elite conference. The format was simple: five teams of five took on five quests, and the fastest team to clear all of them took the win. Each quest pushed people to think on their feet, work fast, and divide up tasks without a manual. By the second, the room was getting louder, the fun was real, and teams that hadn't met an hour earlier were strategising like they'd worked together for years. 3. Speero Circus This was Speero's first AI and experimentation conference in London. What made it work was less the topic and more how the day was built. Every session was designed to keep the room active, not just listening. You ended up talking through ideas with the person next to you, then comparing notes when the room came back together. The format made the AI conversation feel less abstract and more like something you could actually take home and try. Each format worked for a different reason. The thread we kept noticing: experimentation events are getting more participatory, and the rooms that pulled that off were the ones we'll remember. Big thanks to the Convert crew on the ground: Tiffany Fortune, Victoria Harrison, Carmen Apostu, Poonam Nagekar, Marcella Sullivan, and Vladimir Popov. 🌮

A/B testing vendors advertise snippets of 2.8KB, 13KB, 17KB. We measured what actually loads in production. The advertised snippet is usually just the loader. What follows arrives after the page renders, distributed across runtime requests. Sometimes hundreds of KB. We analysed the full execution footprint across 8 platforms: initial script, runtime-loaded resources, experiment configurations, total network requests, and timing of execution. What we found: the smaller the reported snippet, the more likely the rest is deferred. The total cost exists either way. Only the timing changes. Snippet size alone is a weak metric. Better questions to ask would be: What is the total payload? When is it applied? What does the user actually experience? Read the full breakdown here: convert.com/blog/a-b-testi…

Experimentation awards are open on both sides of the pond. The first deadline closes tonight. Three programs are taking submissions right now, each with a different angle: - Best In Test Awards 2026 (US) This one is co-hosted by GuessTheTest, Convert.com, and EchoLogyx Ltd, and it recognises the most statistically rigorous A/B tests of the year. Three tiers on the A/B test track: Gold for statistical rigour, Silver for methodology excellence, and Bronze for innovation that moves needles. A second track recognises educational content. Prizes include an iPhone 17 (256GB), iPad 11th Gen, AirPods 4, plus Pro memberships, Convert subscriptions, and Claude tokens. The total pool tops $5,000. Submissions close May 15 at 11:59 PM Eastern, with the live ceremony on June 10. - Experimentation Elite Awards This one is European-judged, with Campaign and Practitioner categories. The panel brings combined CRO experience approaching a century, spanning optimization, UX, statistics, and analytics. Entries close May 26. - Experimentation Culture Awards 2026 Hosted out of Conversion Hotel, this one recognises the teams, programmes, and cultures driving experimentation maturity. Four categories cover individuals through to organisations: Rising Star, Team, Organisation-wide, and Community Award. The window closes May 31, with the live broadcast on July 16. All three awards have different bars, different focuses, and different windows. Whatever you ran or built this year, one of them is the right home for it. The first window closes tonight. The others give you a bit more time to decide which entry shows your best work. Best In Test Awards: guessthetest.com/the-best-in-te… Experimentation Elite Awards: experimentationelite.com/awards/ Experimentation Culture Awards: experimentationcultureawards.com

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There's an iPhone 17 sitting in the Best In Test prize pool. Submissions close tomorrow at 11:59 PM Eastern. GuessTheTest, Convert.com, and EchoLogyx Ltd are running the Best In Test Awards 2026 to recognise the most rigorous A/B tests and educational content in CRO this year. Last year's entries had to clear a real bar: 95% minimum statistical confidence, zero sample ratio mismatch, 100% blind judging. Only 38% of entries met the trustworthiness criteria, so the medal actually means something. Three tiers on the A/B test track: - Gold: most statistically rigorous experiment - Silver: high-impact methodology excellence - Bronze: innovation that moves needles Top three winners take home Apple prizes: 1. iPhone 17 (256GB) 2. iPad 11th Gen (A16 chip) 3. AirPods 4 with noise cancellation Every winner also picks up an annual GuessTheTest Pro membership, a Convert subscription, and Claude tokens. The total prize pool tops $5,000 in value. There's a second track for educational content: Education Impact and Community Contribution awards. These have the same level of recognition with different criteria: clarity of instruction, multi-format contribution, reach, and team participation. Entries are open to in-house teams, agencies, consultancies, and solo practitioners. The live ceremony is on June 10. Submit before midnight Eastern tomorrow. Best In Test Award: docs.google.com/forms/d/1B00UV… Best Educational Content Award: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

Volume of tests matters less than the quality of thinking behind each one. Five lessons from Ellie Hughes worth slowing down for. 1. Trade-offs are the job. Speed, rigour, scale, and precision pull against each other. Strong teams are clear about which trade-offs they're making, and why. 2. "In-house vs agency" is the wrong framing. Internal teams bring context and ownership. Agencies bring perspective and depth. The teams that win combine both. 3. Inclusion sharpens hypotheses. Designing for accessibility changes how you frame problems, design tests, and interpret behaviour. Apply that mindset broadly and the work improves. 4. Better experiments cost more time and data. Quick answers come from smaller samples. Deeper insight needs longer runs and more careful modelling. The trade-off is real. 5. Long backlogs feel productive but defer learning. Testing earlier, even with imperfect ideas, builds the evidence that makes future decisions sharper. The thread running through all five: better decisions beat more tests. Each decision either compounds progress or defers it. The teams that get this right make their thinking visible and keep adjusting. Test volume alone never gets you there. Five articles from Ellie Hughes and Eclipse Group Solutions Ltd., one per lesson: 1. Trade-offs (CRO tests, winners, and value): eclipsegroup.co.uk/resources/cro-… 2. Talent (CRO skills shortage, agency vs in-house teams): eclipsegroup.co.uk/resources/cro-… 3. Inclusion (no such thing as an average user): eclipsegroup.co.uk/resources/incl… 4. Resolution (simple vs complex experiments): eclipsegroup.co.uk/resources/how-… 5. Backlog (where ideas go to die): eclipsegroup.co.uk/resources/test…

The 2026 GuessTheTest Best In Test Awards are officially open. And the case study deadline is coming up fast. After our CRO Month conversations with agencies like Open Partners, ROI Revolution, Inc., EchoLogyx Ltd and Browser To Buyer - CRO Agency, one pattern became pretty clear: The best agencies are sharing what they learn, explaining the thinking behind the work and helping the wider experimentation community get better. And right now, that matters more than ever. Experimentation is becoming more accessible, in part because of AI. More businesses are testing, more teams are curious, and more people are entering the space who may not have been part of the market before. That is exciting. But it also means the loudest advice is not always the best advice. Conversations about statistical rigour, sound process and stakeholder management can easily get buried under hype, shortcuts and “just launch more tests” thinking. The agencies and organizations pushing the message of good experimentation, not just convenient experimentation, deserve recognition. Especially the ones creating content that challenges myths, raises standards and helps teams make better decisions. So this year, alongside the award for standout A/B testing case studies, the GTT Awards will also recognize Educational Content Excellence. If your agency has been creating frameworks, resources, webinars, videos, research or practical content that helps people test smarter, this category is for you. And if you have a strong case study to put forward, entries are open for that too. Submission deadline: Friday, May 15 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Will your agency be on this year’s list?

Full MCP access puts your live experiments in the LLM's hands. Here's how to take back control. The fix is MCPO. It sits between your LLM and your MCP servers and converts them into standard API endpoints. You decide which endpoints to expose. The LLM only gets access to what it actually needs for the task. From there, you build the workflow in n8n. A form collects the request and the page URL. From that, a small model fetches the HTML and generates the JavaScript for the test. Two API calls then create and configure the experiment in Convert. Every team member runs the same safe, optimised process every time. One technique worth taking from this: before building the n8n workflow, use Claude Code once to run the task manually. Watch which API calls it makes and in what order, then extract the JSON. Rebuild those exact calls as n8n HTTP nodes. You end up with a workflow based on what actually works, not what you assumed. The whole setup runs on small, cheap models. Cost and token usage stay low. Full guide by Iqbal Ali: convert.com/blog/ai/build-…

Simbar Dube came to CRO from journalism. His warning about AI: the hard thinking still has to be yours. Simbar is a Conversion Research Specialist at Enavi. Research synthesis that used to take days now takes hours. He's direct about the value of that, and equally direct about where the acceleration ends. Surfacing signals is faster now. Knowing which ones actually matter still requires context, segmentation, and judgment. There's also an offline experiment in there worth reading on its own. A retail client had just opened a new store, with higher in-store order values than online and customers too anxious to buy without seeing the product first. The play was a CRO test built around Buy Online, Pick Up In Store, designed to shift nearby demand into a more valuable channel. Classic experimentation thinking applied somewhere most experimenters haven't gone. When asked to define optimization: "Curiosity. Tested. Proven. Repeat." Full interview: convert.com/blog/optimizat…

AI search is eating top-of-funnel traffic. Sitting this out is still a decision. The shift is real and accelerating. People are searching in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews instead of clicking through pages of blue links. The intent is the same. What has changed completely is the discovery mechanism. Traditional SEO was built around crawlers, rankings and keywords. AI search runs on a different logic. It synthesises, summarises and cites. The brands that show up are the ones with content that AI systems can find, understand and trust enough to reference. That is a different brief to what most content teams have been working to. The market is already moving. Gushwork just raised $9M to deploy networks of AI agents that autogenerate and continuously update search-optimised content and backlinks, built specifically for AI discovery. The infrastructure for competing in this space is being built right now by startups whose entire thesis is that the window to adapt is closing. There are guides and expert frameworks appearing, but the playbook is still incomplete. Brands adapting are doing it in real time, without a clear map, testing what gets cited and what gets ignored. Carmel Makaya walks through where the shift stands, what the early movers are doing differently, and the question that should be sitting at the top of every content and growth conversation right now. If your brand is not showing up in AI search results, who or what is showing up in its place?

The best CRO thinking in South Africa usually stays locked inside agencies. On 6 May, Cameron Calder, Johann Van Tonder, and Nicholas Wright are opening it up. Hype Digital and Convert.com are hosting an invite-only evening at Deer Park Café, Vredehoek, for 40 digital leaders with a view over Table Bay. Between the three speakers, they have built experimentation programmes for Ackermans, Travelstart, BMW, Umbro, Nike, Canon and Woolworths, co-authored the definitive guide on e-commerce optimisation, and are running AI-powered experiments for fast-growing brands right now. The evening covers why visitors drop off, how to personalise without guessing, and where the biggest revenue leaks on South African websites are hiding. Expect real examples of testing velocity, prioritisation and stakeholder buy-in, with open discussion on what experimentation maturity actually looks like inside South African organisations. At the end of the night, South Africa's Most User Friendly Website gets announced live. Every registration enters your site automatically, and the winning team takes home a high-value offsite. Register your interest below before the forty seats are gone. hypedigital.co/hype-digital-e… 6 May 2026 | Deer Park Café, Vredehoek, Cape Town

60 Minutes of AI Truths: How Are Experimentation Agencies Adapting in 2026? x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

The Intersection of Healthcare and eCommerce: Streamlining the Path to Purchase with CRO x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Healthcare eCommerce has a problem nobody wants to say out loud. Craig Smith and Tellef Lundevall are tackling it tomorrow. Last seats. The data that would help most is the data users are most afraid to share. And that is just one of the tensions that makes CRO in healthcare categorically different from anything a standard eCommerce playbook was built for. Users are not browsing. Every page element is being evaluated for trust. Compliance constrains what you can test. Traffic volumes make statistical significance genuinely hard to reach. And success cannot be measured at the click, the outcomes that matter happen weeks or months later. CRO practitioners working in this space are operating on assumptions borrowed from a different category entirely. Tomorrow, Convert is joining Craig and Tellef from OuterBox to work through the specifics. Craig built and exited a five-time Inc. 5000 optimisation agency, and now lectures at Harvard and NYU. He knows the gap between what looks good in a case study and what actually holds up in practice. Tellef came out of Google's Accelerated Growth Team, built a rigorous attribution-focused firm, and has spent years working on the specific places where standard measurement models stop making sense in healthcare. The session covers the personalisation dilemma in regulated environments, how to approach statistical significance when traffic is low, and what measuring success actually looks like when the outcome is not the click. It goes well past "choose a HIPAA-compliant vendor." April 22, 11:00 AM EDT. Replay available. Register in the first comment.