Hello everybody, I’m Brian Lewis and let’s talk some A/B split testing. If you’re looking for ways to grow your business with your website, one of the best ways to do that is with A/B testing.
So what exactly is A/B testing? Well, essentially what you’re going to be doing is creating a variant of one of your web pages by changing one or more elements on that web page and then you’re going to be sending a portion of your traffic to that variant and the other portion of the traffic to the control page (usually done 50 50). After you’ve done that for a while, then you’re going to want to evaluate your your key performance metrics in your analytics to see which page is performing better for you from a marketing perspective and if the variant’s winning, then you’re going to want to roll out that variant to 100 of your traffic and then you can test again. Sounds good right?
Let’s talk about some ideas or sources for ideas for coming up with what you want to test. And we got some okay ideas in terms of brainstorming. You can get together with your team and come up with some ideas collectively on some things you want to test and that’s an okay idea. Another somewhat okay idea is ask your CEO, likely he or she will have some very strong opinions on what they’ll want to see tested on a page. And yet another pretty good idea is by looking at case studies. In other words, what have other companies especially in your industry done? What tests have they done to see what has worked and what’s not work? So those are all you know pretty satisfactory.
The best source though is going to be your quantitative and qualitative research. So I want to dig down a little bit deeper into what I mean by that. For quantitative research, you want to take a real deep dive into your analytics and look for any kind of visitor behavior trends that are giving you the indication that your visitors are are hitting speed bumps or hurdles in the visit experience. This could be pages maybe where they’re spending an exorbitant amount of time, maybe pages where they’re exiting the site or abandoning the flow. You also want to look at heat maps. Heat maps are great visual representation of where your visitors are moving their mouse, where they’re clicking, and also where they’re scrolling. So you can get some really good ideas there if they’re clicking on things that shouldn’t be clicked or vice versa or they’re not scrolling. Some really good ideas to test. In terms of qualitative, you want to take a look at things like your CRM, your chat logs, your emails, call recordings, interview your customer service and sales staff.
When you’re on the phone or when they’re on the phone talking with the prospects and customers, what are the hot buttons, what are the pain points what are the real important things? And that should give you some good ideas in terms of testing maybe some high level messaging. Also you can do user testing, which is recruiting people to actually test certain things on your site and observe if they’re having any particular problems. All these are great ideation tools for what what you want to test.
A great way to incrementally improve the marketing effectiveness of your site and to convert more more visitors to customers is through A/B testing. If you’d like to know more, please contact us. We’d be happy to help! Thank you.