What is A/B Testing?
In today's world wide web, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for websites to help businesses build brand awareness and encourage potential customers to convert. For this reason, A/B testing has become one of the top marketing tools and concepts. A/B testing is a crucial step in making decisions about how to best reach your audience and how to get them to take action on your website.
What is A/B Testing?
A/B Testing - sometimes called split testing or bucket testing - is the process of creating two or more types of landing pages or applications to see which one performs the best. The variations are shown to users at random and then analyzed to see which one converts.
During this experiment, directly comparing two different variations allows you to make more focused changes depending on which execution is converting better. Testing allows your business to be more certain about what your target consumers like and don’t like. Measuring the impact of the experiment over time will give you real-time results to make positive changes.
How to Run an A/B Test:
Collect Current Data:
On your current site, be aware and gain insights into your high-traffic or high-converting areas. These analytics will let you know where to begin optimizing. Begin with the high-traffic areas, and then identify where the least amount of conversion is happening so you can target it.
Identify Goals:
Your goals are going to be the conversion metrics you will measure to determine which variation is doing better than the other. Goals can be clicking a call-to-action button, purchasing the product, email sign-ups, or downloads. Identify what is most important to you, your business, or your marketing strategy.
Generate Test Ideas:
After you've identified your goals, you can begin creating A/B testing ideas or inferences of why you think they will outperform the current version. Once you have your list of ideas, organize them in terms of the expected difference you think it will make and how difficult it will be to incorporate it.
Create Variations:
Using the A/B testing platform of your choice, make the changes to your landing page and sites from the ideas you generated. This might be changing the color of the header, changing the color of a button, hiding elements on the page, or something entirely custom. The platform will generate a page that looks like the current site - the control - or one that incorporates the changes - the variation.The tools on the software should make these changes easy to do, but be sure to try it out to make sure it works as expected.
Run Testing:
Release your experiment and wait to see how your visitors react. With this step, site visitors will be shown, at random, either the control page or the variation. Their interaction with the site will be measured, recorded, evaluated, and compared.
Analyze Results:
Once the test is done, it's now time to examine the results. Your A/B testing software will have all the data from the experiment and will show you the difference between the two versions performed, and if there is a drastic difference. Compare the results to what you identified your goals to be. If the results favor the variations, you can apply the changes. If the results favor the control, you can keep the landing page as is. If there is no real difference in the results, you may want to consider running another A/B test.
Remember: “All
life[marketing] is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, modified by Consult FGC. 😏