Overview

Many times, marketers face the dilemma of what should be communicated to customers and what is futile. They would specifically want to know, "Is the communication that I am sending to my customers adding any value to them or my business? Will I be able to fulfill my objectives without sending that communication piece? " Here is where marketing research experts suggest using Control & Experiment group.

Experimental Group

An experimental group is a subset of customers we are targeting in an experiment who receive the communication being tested.

Control Group

A control group is a subset of the customers we are targeting with a particular campaign, who will not receive the campaign communication.

A control group is a subset of the customers we are targeting with a particular campaign, who will not receive the campaign and will hence serve as a baseline to compare campaign performance. When one compares the variation with control, one can check the impact of the campaign i.e. whether customer engagement and conversions were better or worse off if the specific campaign was not sent to some customers.

While no communication is being sent to the control group, MoEngage tracks the conversions for the users falling under this group. The Control group serves as a baseline for the experiment group to compare the performance of communication. When one compares the variation with control, one can check the impact of the campaign i.e. whether conversions were better or worse off if the specific campaign was not sent to some customers.

The snapshot below offers a comparison between the control group and the message where we can see that by sending the notification, the marketer was able to get an uplift of 126% for the primary conversion goal.

So whenever you need to communicate anything to customers, use a control group to establish its (f)utility.

Click here to know how to create an experiment using MoEngage.

Including a control group in your experiment

In the Control Group section, you can do the following:

1. Click Global control to exclude the users in the global control group for the campaign.
2. Click the Campaign control group to exclude the users in the control group for the campaign. You can specify the percentage of users from the target audience to be excluded from the campaign as shown below.