Understanding Noise & Latency

When planning your TMT cycles it is important to understand the concepts of ‘noise’ and ‘latency’ and the impact that they can have on your TMT cycles.   If you do not understand noise and latency you can end up coming to the wrong conclusions and making the wrong decisions because you have misinterpreted your results.

What is Noise?

Noise means any outside factors that can have an impact or skew the results of your test.  If you are not careful noise can cause the results of your test to be incorrect, which in turn will result in you making incorrect decisions.

• Examples of noise which might impact the results of your test are below.
• Natural disasters (Volcano erupting, big storm etc)
• Commercial noise (Interest rate rise, stock market crash etc)
• Promotional noise (major changes in the promotion of your website)
• Publicity / Media noise (articles in magazines or newspapers about your industry or organisation)
• Competitive noise (competitor does something drastic or unusual in their webmarketing)
• Seasonal noise (Christmas, Easter, Mothers Day etc)
• Day of Week Noise (different results on different days)

You need to be asking yourself – what outside ‘noise’ could be impacting the results of this test.  Do I need to run the test for longer period of time?  Should I keep the length of test short?  Should I exclude results from a certain period of time from the overall test?

What is Latency 

On many occasions visitors will not immediately respond to your offers.  Sometimes they will take days, weeks or even months to respond to your offers.  This is called latency.  Even the most compelling, low-risk offers have a degree of latency.   High ticket offers and complex offers will often have very high latency.

If you are not aware of the latency associated with your test you can end up with the wrong result and in turn make a wrong decision.  Once you have stopped your test you will need to continue measuring your results for a period of time.