Control Group

In any scientific experiment, scientists form two groups to conduct their experiment.

• Control Group
• Test Group

Control Group is a group of subjects that are isolated, shielded, and do not go through any variable changes during the test. Similarly in growth marketing, tests are conducted on your audience to drive the best possible outcome. One can run A/B tests with two groups.

• Control 
• Variant

For example, you are a mobile marketer and decide to run an A/B test for push notifications on your audience. But you shouldn’t run an A/B test on your entire audience. You will need a subset of your audience to run these tests on in order to understand the efficiency of the variant. So a percentage of the audience is put aside as a control group and they are not exposed to variations. The variant group undergoes A/B to derive the best possible push notification. Using this result, the control group is exposed to drive better conversions.