Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B Testing

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion Rate Optimization(CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action. Depending on the website or business the conversion may be purchasing a product, filling out a form, signing up for something or any other number of things.

CRO emphasizes the importance of understanding who your users are and what drives, stops and persuades them so you can build the most effective optimization strategy. Drivers are what brings users to your site, barriers are what makes them leave and hooks are what persuade them to actually act. These three elements are critical to understand in order to optimize user experience and ultimately encourage users to convert.  

How do I start using CRO?

There are a variety of different tools available to start optimizing your conversion rates and they fall into three primary categories. Quantitative tools like Google Analytics are used to collect numerical data and track what’s happening on your site. Qualitative tools like on-page visitor surveys provide website feedback to collect non-numerical data and investigate why users act a certain way. Once you have a good idea of the what and why happening on your website, the third category is the tools used to test changes and measure improvements. A popular tool for this is A/B Testing. 

What is A/B Testing?

What started over 100 years ago as simple agricultural experiments to compare outcomes of certain farming practices, has evolved into arguably one of the most important digital marketing research practices in todays world. That is, A/B Testing. 

A/B testing simply refers to the experimental procedure used to compare two versions of something in order to learn which one will be more successful based on a pre-determined performance indicator. More specifically, comparing two variations(the original, known as the control and the variation, known as the variant) of a webpage or app to see which performs better. 

It’s highly useful when asking questions about how specific elements of your website are impacting conversion goals. 

How to Run an A/B Test

An A/B test is set up like an experiment and fairly easy to carry out. Here are the steps:

First, Decide what you want to test. You can investigate your current analytics and look for areas that need improvement to determine this. 

Then, select the conversion metric that will be used to evaluate performance. 

Generate hypothesis as to why specific variations will have more positive impacts on the specified conversion metric than what’s currently being seen. 

Now you will need to actually create the variation. Whether it’s changing the color or size of a button or rearranging the order of certain elements, the A/B test will be able to compare the performance. 

Finally, you can run the experiment. To run the test show two randomized sets of users the two variations of the website. As users visit the website analytics will be gathered to compare the effectiveness of the variation on the specified conversion metric. 

Once the experiment has run its course the A/B testing software will use statistical analysis to evaluate the impact of the variation and measure whether the difference is statistically significant. 

A/B Testing is such a powerful tool for digital marketers. For example, A/B Testing allows marketers to test ad copy in order to learn which version attracts more clicks. Once they know, they’re able to implement those test results into the subsequent marketing campaigns. It is an important tool to be using as it has the potential to decrease the overall spending on any given marketing campaign by ensuring each step of the campaign is working as efficiently as possible.

CRO vs. A/B Testing

Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B Testing are similar in that they both aim to increase conversions. They differ in that A/B testing is a tool that can be used for Conversion Rate Optimization. A/B Testing is one piece in the overall puzzle of the Conversion Rate Optimization strategy. 

If you’re not quite convinced of the importance of CRO, here’s a blog post featuring six case studies of highly effective uses of Conversion Rate Optimization. Intuit was able to increase conversions by 211% simply by implementing a proactive chat feature on the pages with highest purchase intent!