A/B Testing & CRO Need to Knows

In marketing, not every idea is going to land or find success. But Junk Charts author Kaiser Fung of Columbia University has created an applied analytics program that is helping markets be able to do their jobs more effectively with more cost savings. The proof is in the pudding, as this program uses basic hypothesis and analysis to find answers for how we optimize in businesses. It makes the user experience better by tracking user data.

So what is AB Testing and how does it work?

A/B testing pits two different versions of a website, advertisement, email, popup, or landing page head-to-head to determine which is performing better. Within these platforms, we could see changes to headlines, graphics, product descriptions, image placement, button color or size, to name a few. This gives organizations and marketing teams a distinct advantage on how and where to invest with their marketing budget and reduces risk. By gathering empirical data from controlled testing, we may learn that one version is potentially twice as effective as its counterpart.

Outside of crafting marketing strategies, A/B testing helps us understand our target market and trends in the industry and will lead to higher conversion rates and lower bounce rate.

The A/B Testing Framework

• Collect: First collect data from a high traffic area of your site or app. It is best to begin with high drop-off rates or low conversion rates.
• Identify: Identify your goals and metrics you want to compare the variation with the original version. Goals could vary from email signups, purchases, or clicks.
• Generate: Generate a hypothesis and testing ideas for what changes may work best and what will make A better than B.
• Create: Create variations of your hypothesis using A/B testing software. This could be swapping elements of a site, changing button colors or screen layout, hiding certain elements.
• Experiment: Run the experiment by waiting for your customers to use both the A and B versions. They will be randomly assigned to the changed version or the original.
• Analyze: Analyze your results based on the changes you made to your site, and determine if these changes were statistically significant. Make sure to pay attention particularly to both sample size and effect size.

What about the CRO approach?

CRO stands for conversion rate optimization, which is the process of increasing the percentage of users who complete a desired action on your platform (website or app). These actions may be clicking a link, adding to cart, subscribing, completing a form, or making a purchase. A conversion rate is calculated by the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors. Our rates are going to depend on the metric you’re measuring. For example, a button click is going to have a higher conversion rate than a purchase. Both are still actions we’d like to know as the building, marketer, or overall company.

Along with this simple metric, it is important for companies to find the “why” in what they are seeing. Assessment and engagement with their product users and customers is important to couple in conversion rate analysis. Listen to what they are saying, watch how they are using, talk to the website designers, product designers and then draw connections between all.

Comparing and contrasting A/B Testing and CRO: The key takeaways

A/B testing is a strategy that can be utilized for improving conversion rates. It requires a significant sample size to have statistical significance. A/B testing relies heavily on who is coming up with hypothesis and the effectiveness really relies on the marketers and people testing these theories. While CRO process involves the A/B testing technique, but there are many platforms, tools, and methods for testing. CRO is a repeated practice, and focuses on one metric at a time. With CRO, we are relying straight from web analytics, which could be tested using funnel testing, multivariate testing, split or redirection tests. There are many ways to utilize this strategy, and ideally we are fetching reasons why our websites or apps are failing.

As far as similarities, they both use customer actions to formulate conclusions about features and website dynamics, and they are both used to increased optimization. At the end of the day, both A/B and CRO software serve an important role for businesses and marketers to highlight how their users are using their websites and apps and to hopefully use it to grow and advance.