Picture this: You own an online boutique specializing in unique, handcrafted jewelry, and you’ve just redesigned your homepage, added new product images, and tweaked the layout to make it more visually appealing.
You sit back and admire your work, and a question nags at you: Will these changes actually lead to more sales? Will your customers find the new design more engaging? Or could it inadvertently hurt your conversion rates?
Fortunately, you do not need a crystal ball to get answers to these questions. A/B testing has the answers!
Understanding A/B testing
A/B testing (also known as split testing) can be likened to testing a new menu.
Imagine you’re a chef deciding on a new dish. You have two variations of the same recipe in mind, both are delicious, both are good-looking, but you do not know what your customers will like.
Instead of guessing, you prepare both versions, serve them to your customers, and leave a feedback card asking which they like better. This real-time experimentation allows you to choose the winning recipe, making sure your new menu will attract the most paying customers, who will not just return but also tell their friends.
A/B testing in digital marketing works similarly to this type of restaurant promotion. But instead of recipes, feedback cards, and hungry customers, you experiment with landing pages, web designs, and audience behavior.
An opportunity in A/B testing
Did you know that only about 60% of companies actively engage in A/B testing to optimize their strategies? This statistic even goes lower for small businesses because they are less likely to use optimization tools than larger ones.
This means that you already have a competitive edge over your rivals if you use A/B testing in your marketing efforts.
Here’s how A/B testing can help your business:
Data-driven decision-making
Relying on gut feelings or assumptions can be very risky, especially for businesses that need a consistent inflow of sales to stay afloat. A/B testing provides concrete data, so you do not have a solid foundation for your design choices, instead of just guessing.
Improved user experience
Using A/B testing helps you identify what works best for your audience. This helps in creating a more engaging and user-friendly website. An engaging and user-friendly website makes it easier for your visitors to find the solutions and products you offer.
Increased conversion rates
Lastly, A/B testing lets you play with changes that affect your conversion rates. Even small changes, like altering the color of a call-to-action button or changing the headline, can lead to significant improvements in conversion rates, and A/B testing allows you to identify these high-impact changes, so you can implement them and even improve upon them.
Convinced? Here is an overview of how you can implement A/B testing in your digital marketing efforts.
Step 1: Identify problems or rooms for improvement
Zig Ziglar said, “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” Let’s focus on the word “properly.”
A properly set goal should be based on data and not just speculation. Some ways to gather information on where to improve are:
Website analytics
Fire up your Google Analytics and take a look at your website’s current performance. Look at the reports:
- A high bounce rate (above 60%) usually means there is a problem with the relevance of your content or issues with the UX.
- Pages with high exit rates, especially at key points in the user journey, can indicate that visitors are leaving your site at critical moments. This could be a problem with the copy or CTA.
- If the conversion rate is lower than expected, it indicates that visitors are not completing the desired actions, and there could be a problem with the content or CTA.
- A low average session duration often means that users are not engaging deeply with your content. This could indicate that your content is not compelling enough or that users are not finding the information they need, that they get frustrated and click away.
Heatmaps
Another place where you can pull valuable data for your page’s performance is through heatmaps. Heatmaps are a visual representation of the areas on your webpage that receive the most attention from users.
They use color coding to show which parts of the page are most frequently interacted with, hovered over, or clicked. Here are some common interpretations of heatmap data:
- Areas that are getting the most clicks, indicate popular elements.
- Sections where users are spending the most time suggest engaging content.
- Parts of the page that are being ignored, which may need redesigning or relocating.
Small businesses that have small marketing budgets, do not worry! There are many websites that offer either a free trial or a free account.
- Hotjar
- Crazy Egg
- Mouseflow
- Smartlook
- Inspectlet
- Lucky Orange
Competitor Performance
Another way to find ways to improve your site is by looking at your competitors’s successful pages.
How do we know which pages are successful? You can use free traffic data estimators like SimilarWeb, SEMrush, or Ahrefs.
You can also just go to their site and take a look at the pages you know (don’t guess) are successful. What are they doing? What topics do they discuss? How do they present their content? List those down.
Step 2: Implement an A/B testing software
Now that you have data from analytics, heatmaps, and looking at your competitors’s websites, it is time to combine them all together to create tweaks to your pages.
Here are the steps for implementing A/B testing software in your site:
Create your hypotheses
Based on the data from analytics, heatmaps, and competitor analysis, formulate hypotheses about what changes might improve your site. For example:
- “Changing the call-to-action button color will increase clicks.”
- “Simplifying the navigation menu will reduce bounce rates.”
Design variations including those hypotheses
Create different versions of the webpage or element you want to test. Ensure that each variation is distinctly different based on your hypotheses.
Install an A/B testing software
Once you have your design variations, it is time to install the A/B testing software. Now, you do not have to spend much on conducting A/B tests. Again, there are websites that let you do A/B testing for free:
- Mutiny
- Optimizely
- Google Optimize
- VWO
- Unbounce
Installing the software usually includes downloading a piece of code (that your visitors cannot see) and putting it inside the webpages you want to split test.
Once you have it installed correctly, it will start serving the control (the original page) and the variations (the pages with changes) evenly to your visitors.
Step 3: Wait while it gathers data
Now, this is arguably the hardest part: we wait. Give it a few weeks to gather significant data.
Do not fall into the trap of logging in every hour, every day, to see how the variations race. It will just drive you crazy. Do something else — create new content, research new trends, or do something else that will improve your offline life.
Step 4: Implement and continuously improve
Once you have your results, implement the new changes if it is a positive lift (changes in conversion) or create a new design if it makes a negative lift.
Continuously improve your results by creating new variations based on the winning designs until you are satisfied with the page’s performance.
If you are having trouble using A/B testing tools, are stuck, or your results have plateaued, you might want to consult a CRO agency.
Examples of successful A/B testing results
Here are three examples of winning A/B testing efforts from live company websites. We found these using our very own prediction engine.
Iron Mountain
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