What is Split Testing?
Ever wondered what page on your website receives the most traffic? Or why your lead form isn’t generating leads as much? What pages have the most activity and why? If these questions have already crossed your mind in the past, then split testing should definitely be your next course of action.
It’s common for business owners to continuously want to improve their operations. Whether you’re running a small mom and pop business, or a large corporate empire, innovation is the lifeblood of all successful organizations. But before you can innovate, you need to have the data gathered and get the facts straight. The question that you first need to ask is “What are the pain points that you want to eliminate?” From there, it will be easier for you to set up experiments that will test the different variables of your website’s pain points.
Split testing or A/B testing is the process of conducting experiments in order to improve a website metric. Whether it’s to increase form completions, improve click rate or convert leads, tests should be done under controlled circumstances. It’s also important that visitors aren’t aware that they are part of an experiment. This ensures that your visitor behaviour won’t be influenced in any way.
This marketing method is often used to test the effectiveness of signup forms or calls to actions. But it can also be used to test other website pages where there is a measurable action that needs improvement. For example, if the checkout page on your website is getting a lot of bounce rate, you can test different factors to see which ones are hindering client action. You’ll be able to determine which areas need improvement in order to increase orders through the website.
Web design is another area where A/B testing can be useful. Choices like color, page layout, even the text used can be tested to see what design would work the best. The data collected from these experiments can be used to support or disprove a given hypothesis. As long as there’s a quantifiable goal, measuring different factors can easily be done.
There are a lot of tools you can use to test different factors on your website. You can set different variations and test it on clusters of visitors that visit your site. This way, you’ll be able to really tailor fit or personalize the user experience. You can greatly improve their web experience by knowing which areas they tend to gravitate towards.
Depending on the set goals, marketers and web developers can test the following elements during an a/b testing.
- Visual – colour scheme, fonts graphics and videos
- Text – content headline, product descriptions, calls to action
- Layout – menus, arrangement and sizes of clickable buttons, forms
- Visitor Flow – users’ general behaviour on getting around the website
If you’re still wondering how you can use a/b testing to your advantage, here are a few practices that you might want to try. You don’t have to test everything on this list though. You just need to make sure that it supports your given hypothesis.
Elimination
Is there too much going on your page? If you think that conversion is low because of the different page elements, why not try eliminating some? Recent studies show that a lot of internet users these days prefer the minimalist approach. The simpler the approach, the better the conversion rate so you might want to lessen the distraction to achieve that conversion goal.
A Clear Call to Action
Is your call to action a bit vague? Does it clearly speak to your target audience? Test different calls to action to see which one can yield the best results. Remember that the text you use can have different meanings to different people so construct a call to action that is clear and concise. Don’t beat around the bush. Most online users will always prefer the simpler approach.
Overall Effect
Although testing is done on specific pages, it’s important that you still keep the overall goal of the website in mind. Don’t take the page-by-page approach. Instead, look at how the different pages will be able to contribute to the success of the website as a whole. Aim for what would be best for the website in general and not just what would be good for specific pages.
Improve User Experience
When testing, make sure that you don’t implement a barrage of changes at one go. Make the changes subtle, and yet consistent so that your consistent online users don’t get turned off by the many changes you’re implementing all at the same time. It’s important to keep the customer experience in mind so that the changes are still consistent with the visitor flow.
Habitual a/b testing for websites can help business owners make data informed decisions and implement the necessary changes. This makes innovation much viable as it helps the decision makers make changes for their audience. You can learn a lot from your user behaviour and how you can use achieve your business goals, if only you take the time to pay attention. That seemingly small click is already a data point from a potential client. a/b testing can also be used to put to rest any conflicting hypothesis you may have. From email subject lines to banner layouts, you can do split testing to see which one would be most effective for your website.
Testing takes away the guesswork from website optimization. Through split testing, you can use data to figure out what your next step would be. You can also use this method to change business operations and shift from just thinking to actually knowing. Also, by measuring the impact generated from tested changes, you’ll be able to ensure better results that will meet your overall business goals.
Constantly testing your website and implementing the best optimizing practices will increase leads and eventually lead to better revenue. But apart from that, collecting user behaviour data will give business owners and web developers’ valuable insight that will help them serve their online users better.