A/B Testing Tools To Use
If you or your company has yet to implement A/B testing into your websites, landing pages, apps, or marketing campaigns than you need to get with the program. A/B testing is the key to optimizing interactions between business and consumers in order to maximize conversions. This is a key tool for any digital marketer seeking to improve conversion rates. Here's how A/B testings works...
- Analyze Your Data
- Identify Conversion Goals
- Hypothesize A/B Tests
- Create Variations
- Run Experiment
- Analyze Results
These are the 6 basic steps to running an A/B test, for more detail on the process, A/B testing & SEO and more visit Optimizely blog about A/B testing. If you're lazy and don't feel like reading through their fucking awesome blog keep these best practices in mind.
- Question all of your assumptions. It's important to be able to objectively view your website. Just because you love something about your website doesn't mean that everyone will, test everything.
- K.I.S.S. Keep it simple stupid, when you first begin A/B testing try testing one change at a time, this helps to pinpoint which changes had an effect on your conversion rates.
- Experiment early and often. The sooner you begin to optimize the sooner you will get your data and will be able to begin improving your website. The more you experiment the better the chances you have to find something that works.
If you're still unsure of about A/B testing and it's prosperous nature, here's a great example of it's success with our former president Barrack Obama. In an attempt to raise funds for his campaign. In this experiment, Dan Siroker used A/B testing on a splash page for Obama's website focusing on the media and the call to action button.
The experiment involved four different "sign up" buttons, and six different forms of media, three images and three videos combining to make 24 possible different combinations on the website. The goal of the experiment was based off the conversion rate of conversions / users who've viewed the splash page. The results of the experiment are staggering.
The variation in sign ups due to a mere change of a button have clear and statistically significant changes in viewers rate of conversions. When factoring in the combinations of the media and the button gives even more impressive statistics.
A 40.6% improvement in conversions / visitors as compared to their other combinations of media. The campaign provided roughly 10 million sign ups which, based off of the statistics, led to an increase of 2.88 million more sign ups than what the original splash page would have provided, ceteris paribus. Averaging at around $21 per sign up this means that the use of A/B testing led to an increased $60 million in donations. Which I believe give clear insight as to how A/B testing is a strong force in digital marketing.
