A Simple Guide to A/B Testing

Have you heard of A/B Testing?

If you have, you may think it’s too complicated, or even unnecessary. Who has the time to change around components on a website? And, if you’ve taken all this time to find your perfect website, why would you want to change it?

The answer is simple. Your website is not for you-- it’s for your users. And seeing what elements they like and respond to will help you create the best user experience possible.

What Is an A/B Test?

Also known as a split test, an A/B test randomly shows two different variations of the same webpage. You have webpage A and webpage B, usually identical except for one little bitty change.

Of course, you can also present two dramatically different pages, but it works better with smaller tweaks. You’d be surprised how changing the header or the colour scheme can affect user engagement.

But don’t expect split testing to provide miracle results, either. The magic isn’t in switching around words, but using testing results to better understand your audience.

For example, you have a newsletter and want to build a subscriber list for it. You can test different calls-to-action, such as:

• • Join the {number of subscribers} who subscribe to my newsletter
  • Get your weekly dose of inspiration from {your site}!

You can test both calls-to-action to decide which one converts more. This metric will also provide insight about your audience. In the first case, maybe they’re motivated to be a part of a community. If they respond more to the second call, they may enjoy a more sensationalized approach.

Knowing this, you can start to incorporate that type of emotion into other areas of your site. If it’s community, you can add more social integration with share buttons or Facebook comments. If it’s sensation, use that voice in your content to communicate with your readers.

So, How Do You Do It?

First, you start by figuring out what your goals are. What would you like for people to do more of on your website? Subscribe to your newsletter, download your ebook, watch your video series, or hire you? Once you determine that, then you can decide on what element to test.

Let’s take the scariness out of testing. Although you can use Google Analytics to do your A/B testing for free, it may be complicated if you’re don’t know HTML and don’t want to know it.

In this case, use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) program like Visual Website Optimizer, or VWO for short. VWO isn’t cheap, but for around $50 a month, you can do A/B testing without messing around with code.

that price is too steep, check out Convert with a pay as go rate of $9. It’s also a dead-simple WYSIWYG program that integrates with Wordpress, and many other popular services.

In Closing

A/B testing is a necessary part of building your website. Split tests let you know what’s working and what’s not. By committing yourself to constant testing, you’ll be much more in touch with your audience, and that’s the best advantage of all. [ssba]

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