Level Up Your Career With These Online A/B Testing Training Programs

Continuous learning is critical to ensuring the future of your career. But structured professional development can also be hard to manage: it requires you to invest time, money and precious brainpower. And more often than not, it comes in addition to your normal day-to-day duties.

All that aside, if you’re looking to make some career moves, online training courses are a great place to start, and luckily, there are many online learning platforms that offer courses focused on optimization.

First, here’s a quick overview of our favorite learning platforms:

LinkedIn Learning—formerly known as Lynda.com—is an online learning platform focused on helping professionals expand their skillsets. Purchase an annual or monthly membership, and you have thousands of courses available at your fingertips. Annual memberships start at $19.99/month, and month-to-month memberships are $29.99/month. If that seems steep, we recently found out that many local libraries offer Lynda.com access for free. You can also get a one-month free trial.

Udemy is the “leading global marketplace for learning and instruction,” according to its website. Not sure if that’s true, but I’ve personally benefitted from some really cool courses hosted through their platform. They currently have over 130,000 courses in 60 languages and offer individual, team and business-level subscription options.

Coursera offers a bit of a different experience. Every course on Coursera is taught by an instructor from some of the world’s best universities. The courses will be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken an online class in college: You watch recorded video lectures, take online quizzes, submit assignments, participate in discussion boards etc.

I think the best part about Coursera is that—if you’re like me and already saddled with student loans—it gives you options: You can audit courses for free, which is kind of like being a classroom ghost. You’re there, but you’re really not, and your participation in the course doesn’t go towards any credit. You pay for the course and—if you pass-—you get a certificate at the end saying you completed it. Individual courses on Coursera cost between $29-$99 and take about 4-6 weeks.

If you want to dive deeper into a subject, Coursera offers a specialization certificate, where you complete a series of courses in a specialized area of study. These are priced from $39-$79 per month and take about 4-6 months to complete. Coursera also offers accredited online masters programs in business, computer science and data science, but those programs require an application, 1-3 years of study and can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000.

Learning Conversion Rate Optimization

If you’re just getting started with A/B testing and conversion rate optimization, this course is targeted toward marketers, small business owners and web designers and will help you learn how to approach conversion rate optimization from a high-level. It covers setting goals, prioritizing testing opportunities, creating hypotheses, setting up and running tests and analyzing results.

• Hosted by: Lynda.com / LinkedIn Learning
• Cost: $19.99 to $29.99/month. Free at your local library or with a one-month free trial.

A/B Testing & Experimentation For Beginners

Another basics course, this time hosted via Udemy, A/B Testing & Experimentation for Beginners covers the fundamentals of A/B testing and the many ways it can be applied. Note: as the title points out, this is a course for beginners. Many reviewers said it provided a great introduction to the topic of testing, but does not get into the statistical analysis required to run tests.

• Hosted by Udemy
• Cost: $199.99 Full Price – but Udemy offers sales and significant promotional pricing throughout the year. At the time of writing this, they’re offering a 94% discount on the course to individual users, making it only $10.99.

Marketing Analytics: Segmentation & Testing

Knowing how to segment and test marketing campaigns is a critical skill for digital marketers these days. This course, taught by marketing consultant, Adriaan Brits, shows you—with real-world examples in Google Analytics—how to optimize your campaigns by segmenting and testing them, and then how to analyze your results. Topics include: defining the difference between planned and retroactive segmentation, elements of social segmentation for channel testing, determining the fundamentals of conversion segments and conversion path data and the steps for testing content for different audiences.

• Hosted by: Lynda.com / LinkedIn Learning
• Cost: $19.99 to $29.99/month. Free at your local library or with a one-month free trial.

Data Fluency: Exploring & Describing Data

Data Fluency refers to the ability to work with data to extract insights and determine your next steps. Professionals in nearly every industry can benefit from a basic understanding of the goals and concepts of applied data analysis.

This course, taught by Barton Poulson of datalab.cc, teaches you to prepare data, explore it visually, and use statistical methods to describe it. Course topics include: Data ethics, preparing data, assessing the quality of data, visualizing data, and understanding variability, variance and standard deviations, associations and correlations.

Participants walk away with a deeper understanding of not only how to explore data with graphs, but also how describing data with statistics can be used to help reach goals and make better decisions.

• Hosted by: Lynda.com / LinkedIn Learning
• Cost: $19.99 to $29.99/month. Free at your local library or with a one-month free trial.

Building Recommender Systems with Machine Learning and AI

Learn how to build your own recommendation systems using this LinkedIn Learning course taught by Frank Kane. Kane spent over nine years at Amazon where he led the development of many of the company’s personalized product recommendation technologies.

The course covers recommendation algorithms based on neighborhood-based collaborative filtering and more modern techniques including matrix factorization and deep learning with artificial neural networks. 

You also have an opportunity to develop your own framework to test algorithms and build your own neural networks using technologies like Amazon DSSTNE, AWS SageMaker, and TensorFlow. 

• Hosted by: Lynda.com / LinkedIn Learning
• Cost: $19.99 to $29.99/month. Free at your local library or with a one-month free trial.

Bayesian Machine Learning in Python: A/B Testing

You’ll need to have a grasp on calculus, statistical probability and Python to take this Udemy course which covers the Bayesian statistical method, applied through the lens of A/B testing.

You’ll learn how to use adaptive algorithms to improve A/B testing performance, the difference between Bayesian and frequentist statistics and how to apply Bayesian methods to A/B testing.

• Hosted by Udemy
• Cost: $119.99 full price – but Udemy offers sales and significant promotional pricing throughout the year. At the time of writing, they’re offering a 75% discount on the course to individual users, making it only $29.99.

Learn Customer Analytics with Wharton MBA Students

This course is taught by various instructors from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and part of Coursera’s business analytics specialization.

After completing the course learners will be able to describe the major methods of customer data collection used by companies and understand how this data can inform business decisions, understand the main tools used to predict customer behavior and identify the appropriate uses for each tool, communicate key ideas about customer analytics and how the field informs business decisions and understand the latest analytics best practices from top firms.

• Hosted by Coursera & The Wharton School
• Cost: $79.99

Side note: You can find the Wharton Schools’ four capstone business courses (i.e. the ones that are required for all Wharton MBA students to take) on Coursera. They include Business Foundations, Business and Financial Modeling, Entrepreneurship, and Business Analytics.

Data Wrangling, Analysis and A/B Testing with SQL

If you know SQL then this course is a great next step. (If you don’t, check out SQL for Data Science, first)

This UC Davis course teaches you to apply SQL skills to four increasingly complex and authentic data science inquiry case studies. The skills you learn in this course will give you a framework for analyzing an A/B test.

Specifically, these skills include: how to convert timestamps to common formats and perform date and time calculations; selecting and performing the optimal JOIN for a data science inquiry; cleaning data within an analysis dataset by deduping, running quality checks, backfilling and handling nulls; segmenting and analyzing data per segment using windowing functions and use case statements to execute conditional logic to address a data science inquiry; and more.

• Hosted by Coursera & UC Davis
• Cost: $49.99

UX Research at Scale: Surveys, Analytics, Online Testing

UX surveys are used to uncover user needs, connect needs to user characteristics and understand user attitudes towards systems they use. In this University of Michigan course, you’ll learn the basics of UX research and even conduct a survey on your own.

Course topics include web analytics, A/B tests, remote and unmoderated testing studies, large-scale UX studies, UX research and surveys.

• Hosted by Coursera & University of Michigan
• Cost: $49.99

Need A/B testing training that’s a little more specific and scalable?

Enterprise product, marketing, analytics and engineering teams work with Brooks Bell consultants to build custom training programs focused on various topics within optimization, including:

• The basics of customer-centric A/B testing: testing strategy, experiment sizing, hypothesis and Whypothesis™  design, and more
• Advanced practices like user research, data storytelling and customer insight design
• Skills training in A/B test development, QA, analysis and reporting—specific to your testing tool of choice

We also host intensitve, bootcamp style-trainings focused on various topics within optimization, testing, analytics and personalization. This includes our Holiday Website Optimization Bootcamp for e-commerce and retail companies.

If you’re looking for A/B testing training that’s customized to your needs and scalable across teams and business units, explore our training services and book a free, 30-minute consultation with a member of our team.