Testing brings the best features to your website by improving the user experience. If you test your website, you will be able to understand your customers’ behavior, such as why they are bouncing back, their pain points, how they are interacting with your website, and other crucial information. If you are launching your website directly without proper testing, you might not get the expected results.
Having a well-designed website will not always bring traffic. You must be able to test the performance of each component of your website for improved results. Many companies use A/B testing or split testing to understand which version of your website works better in driving more traffic.
This article will discuss split testing, its benefits, and different tools to perform split testing.
What is split testing?
Marketers consider split testing as A/B testing, but there is a fine line between both the testing. In split testing, the team will create two different versions of the website with some changes different in both versions. Both the versions are made available to different segments of customers to check the performance of both versions. Then, the team checks the incoming traffic for the versions and understands which version performs better. The winning version is then finalized, and the required changes are made.
For example- you want to change the headline and see the conversion rate for that version. You can make two versions with different headlines and see their performance. But with split testing, you can test only one element per version, which makes it different from A/B testing, where you can test many elements per version. To conclude anything, you must have thousands of traffic only for one element.
You can consider the following reasons for implementing split testing for your website.
- Split testing works well for every business type and website.
- It will help increase the return on your investment by eliminating the customers’ pain points.
- You can implement split testing with simple steps.
- You can even conduct split testing in case of low traffic and split that traffic among different versions to get optimum results.
Benefits of Split Testing
Testing your website and its components will improve the overall user experience of your website. It helps the team understand what features are driving more traffic and what element is impacting the performance, so they can make the desired changes to increase ROI.
Not only this, implementing split testing will provide several benefits, such as.
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Improved user engagement
A website contains several elements that decide the website’s performance and the customers’ engagement. Some of the significant elements of any website are- CTA, subject line, headings, keywords, images, etc. Your website drives more traffic if you successfully optimize each element according to the customers’ interests. Split testing allows you to test the performance of each element and understand its effectiveness in driving traffic. Testing improves how the elements should look, resulting in more engaged customers.
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Improved content quality
Proper testing can improve the content quality to keep your customers engaged. Without testing, you cannot understand how your content is working in engaging customers. With testing, you can get metrics such as the number of customers reading the content, bounce-back rate, and click-through rates. Once you analyze the metrics deeply, you will understand the quality and effectiveness of your content. Also, if you go deeper with your research, you will get the areas where your customers feel disconnected from your content.
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Reduced bounce rate
The bounce rate refers to the rate at which customers leave the website without even scrolling the landing page. With split testing, you can find what combination of elements successfully keeps the customers engaged. This way, the customers will spend more time on your website to know more about the products. The customers will get a fantastic user experience.
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Increased conversion rates
The more time customers spend on a website, the more likely they will make a purchase. It will eventually improve the conversion rate. Thus, you must test the performance of your website and its elements and see how it is persuading customers to go with the flow of the website to the purchase page.
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Easy analysis
Split testing is easy to implement. Not only this, it generates simple and detailed results that are easy to analyze to conclude. It helps the marketer quickly understand the performance of website and make the correct decisions based on the testing results. The ease depends on which split testing tool you use, as different tools have different features. Some tools provide the results in reports, charts, and workflows to easily represent complex data.
In the next section, we will see different and commonly used split testing tools that have made the life of marketers and testing teams easier.
Best Split Testing Tools.
Several split testing tools are available in the market to make the testing process more accessible. Each tool has the most straightforward approach and methods to simplify the testing. Some offer automation of tasks, drag and drop features, and more. We have listed some commonly used split testing tools for your consideration.
1. Google Optimize
Google Analytics and Optimize have one of the best A/B or split testing solutions. You can easily avail all of its services for free. If you are a big brand managing a large team, you must sign up for the Google Analytics 360 suite. You will get many free tools and services. This tool provides you with facilities for advanced tracking. It lets you conduct AB testing to create multiple versions of a webpage. You can even conduct server-side experiments. You can personalize your tests depending on what element you want to test and what metrics to generate.
2. Optimizely
It is an enterprise-based A/B and CRO tool available at affordable prices. It is a leading CRO platform offering a suite of CRO tools. It lets your business scale efficiently. Optimizely has various products at its disposal, but its Optimizely web has the facility to conduct AB testing. You can also go for its Optimizely X personalization, which will help you deliver personalized messages to the targeted audience. All the tools provided by Optimizely are easy to use and implement, and you can get along quickly without any technical knowledge. It lets you conduct multi-page testing. You can create variations of your webpage using its visual editor, which does not require coding experience. It offers you advanced targeting and segmentation of the audience. It has a whole stack that lets you optimize mobile applications and digital products.
3. VWO
This tool works similarly to Optimizely but is more cost-efficient than Optimizely. It offers a full suite of CRO tools but at affordable prices. This tool lets you perform different types of testing, such as A/B, multivariate, and split URL. You will also get a visual editor to help you create variations of your website or webpage without coding knowledge. You can also perform advanced targeting and segmentation for your potential customers.
Not only this, but you can also perform behavioral segmentation to target potential audiences in a unique way possible with another tool.
You can code asynchronously to improve the performance of your tests. It reduces the challenges of slow loading times and flickering, which is common among A/B testing software.
4. Zoho PageSense
This testing tool is an affordable option with scalable CRO and personalization features.
Zoho PageSense is an optimization and personalization platform with a reasonable price that a small-budgeted company can afford. There is no restriction on plans, so you can easily avail of its features for free. This tool lets you conduct AB and split testing to improve the overall performance of your website. It also has a visual editor for creating different versions of a webpage with different changes. It has a flexible reporting system that you can customize depending on what metrics you want to generate and analyze. In real-time, you can use its heatmaps facilities to understand the customer’s behavior. You can even analyze the entire funnel throughout your website to understand the customer’s journey. It lets you create a personalized and targeted experience for your customers to convert them into potential leads.
5. HubSpot
This CRO platform is commonly used due to its all-in-one marketing approach. HubSpot does not only provide the facility to conduct A/B testing. But, it is a complete marketing software suite with four essential products.
- CRM helps in handling the customer’s data.
- Marketing Hub offers a wide range of tools for creating quality content, design landing pages, manage potential leads, and performing A/B tests.
- Sales Hub offers unique tools to improve and automate the entire sales process.
- Service Hub is used by the team to provide higher customer service.
All the softwares mentioned above are as per the industry standard that lets you create a website of high quality. HubSpot is an expensive option with many tools within a single system. It lets you connect with the targeted audience with email marketing. You can also connect with the customers with live chat and solve their queries instantly. It lets you automate the marketing strategies for easy working. To avail of HubSpot’s A/B testing features, you must sign up for the Professional plan.
6. Leadformly
This tool is available as a dedicated web form from AB testing. Compared to other A/B testing tools that provide only 90% of what you need for running tests, this tool provides you with every necessary feature that you cannot fall short of any testing need. Such scenarios occur when you are considering the web forms and do not get the in-depth insights you are looking for. But with Leadformly, you will get in-depth form analytics and A/B testing features that will improve your website’s conversion rates and performance. It has an invisible spam filter that removes all unnecessary emails. You can use its visual editor to make the changes and add features to your website.
7. Unbounce
This tool is well-known for its landing page builder to provide a fantastic experience to its customers. The performance, look, and feel of the landing pages are critical to improving the conversion rates. With Unbounce, you can simply do this with its several features. It uses the most straightforward approach to conduct A/B testing. It offers a visual builder where you can see the changes in real-time and understand how they will look and impact your customers. You can personalize the landing page and make it more innovative to engage more customers. It offers popups and sticky bars for more engagement of the customers, leading them to a different section of your website. You can even integrate this tool with third-party applications to extend its functionality.
8. Convertize
It is an affordable solution to AB testing and personalization. This tool has a smart editor with an easy drag-and-drop feature, allowing you to create code-free experiments. It has a fantastic feature of autopilot that helps the team members automatically manage the traffic and divert them to the best-performing pages. One of the other features is its lighting mode, which helps load the web pages even faster. Its statistics engine provides in-depth insights into the website and customers, helping the team understand the scope of improvement. With its dynamic text, you can personalize headings that match user intent.
9. Kameleoon
This tool is standard among enterprise brands. Kameleoon is an A/B testing and personalization platform with artificial intelligence for tailoring customers’ digital experiences. All the personalized experiences that will trigger are actually based on each visitor’s conversion probability. It has an intuitive design that is easy to use.
10. Convert
Convert is an advanced testing platform with several features, specially designed for agencies and CRO experts. It lets you add custom code or use developer shortcuts. It also has a visual builder to create different variations of the website without any code. You will get more freedom to create unique variations and tests them efficiently.
Conclusion
Testing is an important aspect that should not be ignored while designing any website. It helps you discover potential loopholes within your website that can be reduced to improve user experience. If you conduct testing, you will get insights such as customers’ interests, what elements are impacting your website’s performance, and others. Such metrics help you improve the website’s experience, resulting in improved conversion rates.
Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
