5 essential steps to run your fake door tests

We’ve already done our full guide to fake door testing, but if you are just starting out with fake door tests, what are the top 5 things you need to know to achieve a successful test?

In this blog, we tell you exactly that! Let’s get into it.

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1. Have a defined focus for the test

Fake door tests excel at giving high quality and accurate results for consumer insights, however without a specific goal in mind, it can be hard to read these results are tell the story from the data.

When you run fake door tests you need to have a hypothesis statement written down to ensure that you are focusing your tests into a specific area and with a specific variable to test in mind. 

A hypothesis for a fake door test will look like this using the XYZ template:

At least 5% of supermarket shoppers will buy hand cream for €12 - 15

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2. Test different variables

Speaking of variables, with fake door tests you need to make sure that each test only looks into one variable.

The variables could be:

• Branding
• Target groups
• Features
• Pricing
• Value propositions
• Etc.

This means that if you wanted to test your products pricing and features, you wouldn’t run those within the same test. You would instead setup an individual test group for your pricing sensitivity test, and trial 6 different prices, then once you have the data from that you would setup a features test group and run your tests for the features all with the same price.

You could run these in a different way, maybe you do feature first then decide price, but ultimately you need to test one variable at a time. 

The reason for this is because if you tested features and pricing at the same time on the same landing page, the increase or decrease in results wouldn’t be attributable to any one variable. It might have been a price level that increased conversions, but because too much changed on the landing page you can’t tell for sure.

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3. Run multiple tests

Which brings us nicely onto running multiple tests. You shouldn’t be afraid of running 100s if not 1000s of fake door tests a year. This is because they are very quick to setup and get data back just as fast, you can expect the whole process for a test to take a couple of weeks once you know what you are doing.

This is a much faster turnaround and much cheaper turnaround than traditional consumer insights methods which means the typical thinking of how you run tests is different for fake door testing.

For one product you might run 1 test or you might run 10. It depends on the data and what you are looking to get out of the tests. 

4. Use existing consumer insights to direct your tests

Fake door testing isn’t a replacement for your traditional testing, it can replace elements of it, but it also works amazingly well with your current testing methods.

The reason for this is that current methods deliver biased and opinionated insights, whereas fake door testing delivers data-driven behavioural insights. When you put these two together, you get a full idea of your consumer and their needs.

The best way to run fake door testing is to validate your gathered insights. For instance if you ran a price sensitivity test through surveys and uncovered that the ideal price for your product is €14.99, you can then use fake door tests to validate that result with behavioural data. Giving you a reliable and tangible insight into the real-world value of your data.

What we have found is that typically a company can see an increase in the price that consumers are willing to pay from survey to fake door test.

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5. Create a landing page you’d buy from

One challenge with fake door tests is the landing page. A lot of consumer insights teams try and treat it like a typical insights stimulus, when in fact it isn’t. It needs to look and act like a real landing page for a product that has launched.

With this in mind you need to make sure that you are communicating the benefits of product through it’s writing and visuals. We suggest looping in one of the marketing or product team to help with your first few landing pages so you can get a good idea of how to structure them.

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Bonus tip: You can use fake door tests for new AND existing products

Typically people think that fake door testing is for new products that haven’t launched yet, and while it is great for those products, it isn’t always about new products. 

You can also use fake door testing for existing products. That might be an extension to a product line, to adjust the value proposition or even create a feature roadmap by testing feature sets and seeing which is most in demand.

Whatever you want to run fake door tests for, they will work and will give you valuable insights that no other test method can do.