Today, the internet is full of data and is expanding day by day. Many companies use data to make concrete decisions. With A/B testing, you will get more reliable and effective results based on hard facts rather than assumptions. Companies use analytics programs to get insights and analyze customers’ behavior. One of the most common methods is A/B testing.
For any website, analyzing customers’ behavior is everything, and they behave around different aspects of the website. With A/B testing, marketers can rely on the data and test them to get desired outcomes as it eliminates the uncertainty by considering the hard facts only. Implementing A/B testing has become more accessible due to the availability of different testing tools. All you need is to make a solid strategy to work on. With A/B testing, you are free to conduct experimentation as per different scenarios. If your business is not using A/B testing, you are missing lead opportunities.
To improve the performance of your website, A/B testing is essential. This article will focus on what A/B testing is, how it is essential, how to leverage A/B testing to grow your business, steps to conduct A/B testing, different tools, and much other information to help you understand various aspects of A/B testing.
What is A/B Testing?
Managing the website up to the customer’s expectations is not easy. But with A/B testing, you can get insights into your customer’s behavior by creating two variants of your website with different changes and understanding which variant is successful in getting traction for your business. A/B testing allows creating two variants and dividing the traffic equally to see the customer’s reaction.
Once you get the results of your A/B testing, you can decide which variation to use for your website. It ensures that the chosen variants improve the website’s performance. In short, some people can see version A while some people can see version B. It is mainly preferred for making minor tweaks at the page-element level, such as content changes, design, etc. the best thing about A/B testing is that it suits all business types.
A/B testing is generally confused with split testing, but they have a slight difference. Unlike A/B testing, split testing is suitable for significant page changes, such as creating different landing page variations analyzed based on the incoming traffic. Some might prefer conducting multivariate testing experiments for improving a website’s performance, where marketers create several variations of several elements that will be combined randomly.
How A/B testing helps your business to grow?
A/B testing allows the marketers to create two different website variants to discern which variant performs better. A/B testing helps every type of business to get insights about their audience and make the required changes to their website as per the collected facts. Apart from this, A/B testing has helped businesses grow tremendously and generate more leads. Let’s see more benefits that a business can leverage by implementing A/B testing.
- Improves content engagement- as A/B testing helps businesses get insights into their customers, which helps them to tailor their content as per their interests. The A/B test results help you make data-based decisions to improve the content quality. For example, one website variant has effective design and graphics while the other has compelling images and coloring effects. The result shows the graphics page is getting more clicks, so we change the original page to the variant with compelling graphics. This will help to improve content engagement.
- A reduced bounce rate specifies the rate at which people are leaving the website. Having a high bounce rate is terrifying for any online business. So, it is essential to run A/B tests to see what will keep the customers engaging, so they do not bounce back without generating leads.
- Increases conversion rate- creating two different variants take time and effort but seems to be the easiest way to determine which variant is working and get more conversion rates. Having the right A/B tactics will help you convert visitors into loyal customers.
- Higher values- as your business has more loyal customers, your brand value will automatically increase, creating a reputation in the market. Once you have a substantial brand value, people will be willing to pay more to get your products and services. With A/B tests, you can quickly get the information that keeps your customers engaged and what content is more prevalent among them. You can easily attract them.
- Easy analysis- unlike the traditional way of designing and analyzing websites, A/B testing allows the marketers to do easy analysis based on hard facts and figures, eliminating the scope of false results. Even with various A/B testing tools, testing has become more accessible, allowing you to analyze each detail closely and make the proper amendments to the website.
- Reduces risks- recreating or redesigning your website from scratch will cost you a fortune. But with A/B testing, you can examine the customer’s behavior without making changes. A/B testing helps your business eliminate unnecessary risks by optimizing your resources and efforts. Rather than focusing on assumptions, the A/B test uses facts and historical data to make the final decision, reducing risks. In such a way, the marketers understand what will work, reducing the failure rate and improving the success rate.
- Improved sales- business success is measured by its sales. If sales are increasing, then your business is moving towards success. But, how can you assure increased sales? One of the significant methods is A/B testing. It helps your business reduce the bounce rate, reduces critical risks, and improves the conversion rate, and the sales will automatically go high. If everything goes well, you can generate more leads than expected.
- Reduces cart abandonment- for every e-commerce website, one of the significant problems is cart abandonment, where visitors leave the item in the cart without making any purchase. Most websites face this problem, but if you make the right changes and find a suitable combination of changes, it will reduce the cart abandonment rate. One of the ways to determine the right changes is to conduct A/B testing.
- Suits every business type- A/B testing is one of the testing methods any business can use. It does not discriminate among B2C, B2B, start-ups, or a top-giant in the market. It helps to know your customers and make changes as per their interests.
How to conduct A/B testing?
Conducting A/B testing requires a proper strategy that can be followed. Being an iterative process, those steps need to be repeated until you get the proper results. So make sure you follow the simple procedure to get the optimum results. Here, we have mentioned some simple steps to consider while implementing A/B testing. These steps might vary from company to company as per their requirements.
- Choose the testing variable.
A/B testing works well when you test one variable in a single variant. You only have to change the single element of the website’s page and keep the others the same to analyze better which element works and get more customer attraction. Checking each element might take time, but the results are prominent.
- Split the audience equally.
Getting insights into your customer who visits your website can be possible if you track their email addresses. Based on that, you can split your website. You can use marketing automation software to split the customers and quickly analyze the results.
- Test different variants at the same time.
Ensure that all the variants are live simultaneously as many factors can affect the results, such as traffic hikes at a particular time of the day, ongoing sales, free time of the working people, and others. So, make your variants public simultaneously as it will provide you with the exact results with equal traffic. In such a way, you will get to know which variant is visited more and significantly impact the audience.
- Run complete tests.
These tests take time to generate results, so make sure you take enough time to run these tests; otherwise, the results can be vague and different every time. It is recommended that you set a definite number of A/B tests to be run within a month, depending on their time.
- Analyze the results closely.
You can use various metrics to determine the quality of your website and content, such as bounce rate, content engagement rate, conversion rate, and others. You can choose any metrics to gather insights and analyze which variant performs better. After getting all the details, you know which parameters or elements to change.
- Making the right changes.
You can make the required changes to your website and make it available to all users. After making the changes, analyze the performance for some time and then repeat the process of A/B testing till you get success.
Common A/B testing mistakes to avoid
You might make mistakes while implementing A/B testing. If you are doing it for the first time, then you must know what could be the possible mistakes that you must avoid to make the process easier and smoother. Below are some mistakes to avoid.
- Not having enough samples.
If your website does not have enough traffic to divide among the variants, you will face challenges while conducting A/B testing, as you will not get accurate results. Most businesses face problems as they do not have the right traffic.
- Not enough testing.
Some companies run the test only once and use the results to change their website without repeating the testing. Without retesting, you will not find out what changes have worked.
- Not running tests for the entire course.
These tests take time to provide results. It’s recommended to run the entire course to get accurate results. Some companies skip the test in between and use the results. So make sure you take your time and be patient for your tests to work.
- Testing many metrics together.
A/B testing does not work if you want to test several metrics or elements simultaneously, as you will not understand which element has attracted the customer and has contributed to improving the performance of your website. So make sure that you test a single element in a single variant.
Common A/B testing tools
Conducting A/B testing has become easier after introducing various tools to conduct testing. Several tools are available in the market, and you can choose any of them based on your project’s requirements. Let’s take a look at the commonly used A/B testing tools.
1. A/BSmartly
A/B smartly is an in-house cloud experimentation platform to test any product by running simultaneous experiments and offers complete transparency and visibility about possible interactions.
2. Google Optimize
This testing tool has been introduced by Google Analytics and Google Optimize and is available just for free. It is easy to handle and well-suited for large teams of enterprise brands. But to leverage the benefits of this tool, your team has to sign in for Google Analytics 360 suite. You are free to conduct as many tests you want. But you will face some drawbacks like you need to know how to use the platform and technical knowledge.
3. Optimizely
Optimizely is a commonly used CRO platform with entire CRO tools that will help your business scale.
Optimizely offers unique products, and one of them is the Optimizely Web option allowing you to conduct A/B testing for improving the website’s performance. You can also leverage its extended functionalities, such as Optimizely X Personalisation, which will allow the marketers to communicate personally with a different audience. You do not need any technical knowledge to use this tool.
4. VWO
Like optimizely, VWO provides you with a full suite of CRO tools at an affordable price. This tool allows you to conduct different types of testing, such as A/B, multivariate, and split URL experiments. It also provides a visual editor to create variants without any technical knowledge.
It has a behavioral segmentation that targets audiences to improve the performance of your tests.
5. Zoho PageSense
Zoho PageSense is another conversion optimization platform available at a lower price. One of the significant benefits of this tool is that you have to pay depending on your monthly visitors. It is well-suited for small businesses and start-ups.
6. HubSpot
HubSpot not only offers an A/B testing facility, but it is a full suite of testing software offering various products. It has a CRM to handle the customers, a marketing hub for managing leads, and running A/B tests. Another facility is its sales hub, which offers tools for improving the sales process, leading to high-quality customer service.
Conclusion
For improving your website’s performance, implementing A/B testing is one of the easiest ways. A/B testing can be implemented by any business to improve its overall performance and generate more leads. Using A/B testing, you can create two different variants with different changes and split the traffic among both the variants to determine which has more response from the customers. By analyzing the results, you can make the changes as per the results and see the improvement yourself.
If you do not get the expected results, repeat the process to filter the elements to change, and you will get the optimum results. Also, you can take the help of testing tools for an efficient testing process.
My name is Vijay Singh Khatri, and I enjoy meeting new people and finding ways to help them have an uplifting experience. I have had a variety of customer service opportunities, through which I was able to have fewer returned products and increased repeat customers when compared with co-workers.
