A/B Testing

A/B testing is also known as split testing where two variants of the same webpage are shown to different segments of website visitors and then it is compared to know which variant drives more conversions. It can be used to determine which content, functionality, or design layout is more successful with your site visitors. For example, testing two different design layouts of the same product to check which one drives more sales. The winning variant can help you optimize your website for better results.

Importance of A/B Test

• Solves visitor pain points: Visitors come to your website with a set goal in mind. They might be there to simply browse, buy a product or know about any service in particular. What disappoints the visitor is when they are not able to find a buy button or request a demo. Use google analytics and heatmaps to get data about the user behavior and use that information to solve the pain points.
• Drives better ROI: You don’t have to spend a dime acquiring the new traffic, instead, you can use the A/B testing to make the most out of your existing traffic. Even some minute changes can lead to better conversions. Therefore, A/B Test can give you high ROI sometimes.
• Reduces Bounce rates: A/B Test helps you to find the best version of your site which improves the overall user experience and therefore reduces the bounce rate.
• Helps make low-risk modifications: You don’t have to get the entire page redesigned, instead, you can make some minor changes to your webpage with A/B testing. This will result in increased ROI and would not even risk your current conversion rate. For example, if you plan to launch a new feature, you can use A/B testing in the web page’s copy to see if the changes pay off before the actual implementation.
• Get statistically significant improvements: A/B test will give you the clear winner based on metrics like click-through rate, time spent on the website, cart abandonment rate, demo requests and so on which is completely data-driven.
• Redesign your website: You can A/B test every small element on your website and use that to redesign the elements or the complete webpage.
  

How to perform an A/B Test?

• Research: This is the first and the most important part of A/B testing where you have to shortlist pages that get the highest traffic and study them for their qualitative aspects. You then have to collect data on everything related to the number of visitors, bounce rate, cart abandonment rate, and so on.
• Formulate hypotheses: After you have carried out your research, it’s time to analyze the data to create a data-backed hypothesis and test it against different parameters like its ease of setup.
• Create variations: Now the meat of the A/B test is to create a variation for the existing page and compare their results to know which one performs better.
• Run tests: You carry out the testing based on the website's goal and set time for the testing campaign. The test duration is calculated based on the average monthly visitors, the number of variations, conversion rate expected, and so on.
• Result analysis and deployment: After gathering the data from the test, you analyze the results based on parameters such as percentage increase, confidence level, conversions, and so on. You deploy the winning variation after getting the desired results.