Twyman’s Law

Hi 👋  I am Paras Chopra, founder & chairman of VWO. Every fortnight, on this blog and on our email list, I’ll be posting a new idea or a story on experimentation and growth.

Twyman’s law states that any data or figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong.

Sounds unbelievable, isn’t it? 

But, it’s true. I saw this in action recently and wanted to share that story with you.

In June, we ran a test on our homepage and while I was looking at conversion rate by segments, I noticed that users from Windows had a 400% higher signup rate for VWO free trial as compared to users using Mac OS X.  

Download Free: A/B Testing Guide

Now, that’s baffling and our team spent a good deal of time trying to understand why that was happening. Someone in marketing hypothesized that perhaps Mac OS X users have a better design aesthetic and our homepage wasn’t appealing to them. Was it true?

When we dug into data, we realized that our recently installed automated QA service creates signups on the homepage every hour or so (to ensure the form doesn’t stop working) and guess what, that automated service used Windows. 

After removing such QA signups from data, Mac OS X and Windows conversion rate became comparable.

This is a perfect example of Twyman’s law. Remember, if the data is too good to be true, it’s probably wrong. 

Many extreme results are likely to be the result of an error in instrumentation (e.g., logging), loss of data (or duplication of data), or a computational error. 

Hope this mental model was new to you (it certainly was to me!). 

PS: If you also have a story related to exaggerated data to share, email me at paras@vwo.com. I read and reply to all emails 🙂

PPS: If you want to learn more about Twyman’s law, Ronny from Bing’s experimentation team spoke about it in his talk.