Synthetic audiences meet real A/B tests at Principal Financial Group
Blog post from GrowthBook
Erika Dunn, assistant director of data science at Principal Financial Group, describes building an experimentation center of excellence within a 150-year-old, risk-averse financial services company by emphasizing controlled testing, shared learning, and practical use of existing data. Drawing on experience in quantitative psychology, marketing analytics, and experimentation at Amazon, she distinguishes informal attempts from rigorous experiments through the use of control groups and careful planning, while advocating for documented test failures to challenge outdated organizational assumptions. Her team develops metrics such as “looping,” which identifies customers repeatedly returning to the same web pages as a signal of frustration, and analyzes content characteristics to improve marketing messages. Principal has also created in-house synthetic digital audiences based on normalized customer data to rank content and campaign ideas before exposing them to live traffic, while retaining traditional A/B tests as the standard for validating outcomes. An initial synthetic-audience-selected variation won a controlled test, with additional tests planned, and Dunn sees future AI agents helping teams prioritize experimentation opportunities amid growing volumes of data.
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