Have you been doing ads for a while now, but not seeing much interest in your content? If this is the case, you might need to consider A/B testing to get a better understanding of what attracts your audiences'.
If you are not A/B testing your content, you are wasting many of your resources.
As Marketers, we are reliant on our intuition when writing copy, creating landing pages, or designing call-to-action buttons. But guesswork won't cut it, and it can be detrimental to results, it is necessary to collect hard data to understand how particular elements perform on your omnichannel strategy.
There is a lot of information in this blog, so feel free to skip right to the section where you feel stuck in your current process, but if you are new to A/B testing, it might be helpful to read each article to gain a better perspective on your first test.
Contents:
1. Why is A/B Testing Necessary?
2. What Are the Different Types of Tests?
3. A/B Testing Statistics: What Are Champions, Challenges, and Variations?
4. Which Elements Are the Best To A/B Test?
5. Track these four metrics when you are A/B Testing.
6. Conclusion
1. Why is A/B Testing Necessary?
Somehow you were always aware that A/B testing is necessary, but have you ever thought about how much this will affect and change your marketing strategy?
The most obvious reason is that it expands your opt-in subscriber rate, increases conversions, and boost online sales.
If you have already gone through the process of creating your website, your next thought would be if it helps or hinders sales. Through A/B testing, you will be able to discover which images, videos, testimonials, words, and phrases work best, and you will be surprised to see how the smallest change can impact your conversion rates.
According to HubSpot, one test showed that a red CTA button outperformed a green one by 21 percent based on 2,000-page visits. Just think about it; if a minor change such a button colour can entice visitors to click and engage, you'll be surprised at what other elements of your visual content might have an impact on your metrics.
But how will this affect your SEO, you might be wondering.
Your landing page has users' attention for 15 seconds or less before they lose interest and exit your website, throughout your A/B test, you can regulate whether changes made to your site have impacted the speed of your page loads. A fast website can improve your conversions by 7 percent or more, so it's well worth the attempt to make improvements over time.
Website speed is one of Google's top-ranking factors. Google is all about ranking pages that best suit their consumers' needs and fast, seamless experience for its users; therefore, your site will be rewarded if the load times are faster.
2. What Are the Different Types of A/B Tests?
There are many ways to skin a cat, and the same goes for A/B testing. There are technical tests to determine the reliability of your database, and server and security tests to abolish fraud and then there are tests to see which elements outperform the other on your visual content. I am going to focus on the topic of usability, user experience, and customer-friendliness as you should create a pleasant online platform your consumers will enjoy visiting.
Speed Testing
As mentioned before, a delay in your load time can drastically decrease your site's conversion rates. If you would like to see the current speed of your website, you can use a tool like GTMetrix, this tool combines with Google's PageSpeed tool and will help you to determine just how fast your website loads for visitors. If your website is not fast enough, this tool will provide insight into your diagnoses and solve your issue for maximum performance and speed.
Dead Link Checking
Are you providing broken links on your page? Not only is this very unprofessional, but it will also result in visitors leaving your site, never to return. You might have deadlinks on your website and not be aware, you can restore all of your broken links by using Dead Link this site will help you to remove every 403 and 404 errors that may affect your website, remember user-friendliness should be your number one priority.
Mobile Testing
As Voice search is becoming essential more consumers will be doing research on their mobile phones rather than using a desktop, check your Google Analytics, your visitors might already be using mobile over desktop. In this regard, how user-friendly is your mobile site? Check out Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to determine if your website is indeed friendly for all devices.
This tool will tell you whether or not your site is responsive to mobile devices while directing you with tips on how to fix the issues.
Heatmaps
Are you sometimes struggling to decide on where to place a call to action on your website?
Crazy Egg was one of the first to develop a tool to help you study your consumers in real-time. A heatmap is a visual report that enables you to regulate your visitors, and how they are engaging with your website, this testing method will help you to observe user behaviour as visitors land and navigate your website by focusing on where those visitors click, hover or use forms.
3. A/B Testing Statistics: What Are Champions, Challenges, and Variations?
Each form of marketing assets provides you with statistics about your website visitors. The statistics are gathered from your A/B testing and originated from challengers, champions, and variations.
Your marketing asset will be your champion – whether it's an email, web page, Facebook ad, or something else you have tested, and hypothesize will perform well or has a reputation of delivering excellent results in the past. You must test it against a challenger, which is an alternative to the champion, with only one element changed.
After your test findings, you will discover that you either have a new champion or that the first alternative performed best. You will continue to proceed in creating new options to test against your new champion.
4. Which Elements Are the Best To A/B Test?
Headlines, copywriting, and visual content.
What is the first thing you see when you arrive on a new website? It will probably be the most prominent text on that page, which will usually be your headline; if your headline is not attention-grabbing, your visitor will not stay and further explore your page.
Try writing captivating headlines that will intrigue your visitors' curiosity. But a catchy headline is not the only thing that will keep your visitor on your page. Other aspects of copywriting may also have an impact on conversions.
Test multiple levels of persuasion and different lengths of paragraphs. You will get to know your audience on a much deeper level, such as do they prefer a hard or soft sell approach? Are they interested in a statistical or anecdotal copy?
Not all people are the same, some are more visual than others, and I strongly recommend that you should do proper omnichannel marketing. If you have a lot of visual content at your disposal, you can A/B test long infographics against shorter ones'. All of these tests can determine your audiences' interests.
Call to actions (CTA)
People are not necessarily aware that they need something. In that regard, you will need a call to action to persuade your consumer by informing them that your offer is too valuable to resist.
You should select your choice of words very carefully as one word in your CTA can dissuade consumers and affect your conversion rates. In other characteristics – such as text colour, button colour, size, contrast, and shape – can influence your ad's performance.
Don't change too many elements in your A/B testing if you are curious about how well the colour of your background is performing your focus should be on that element alone. Otherwise, you will not be able to identify which change made the difference.
Email Marketing
A/B testing through email marketing is relatively easy, as you can send version A to 50 percent of your database and version B to the other 50 percent. You will need an extensive database to test your content effectively with this method.
The outcome will depend on three factors:
1. Make sure you choose only one element to change in version A and B.
2. Equal numbers must see the email.
3. You have to run the test at least 20 days to gather data on your champion effectively.
5. Track these four metrics when you are A/B Testing.
Cost per conversion (CPC)
Investing in your website's conversions are highly necessary but can cost money and resources; your business will simply not be profitable if the cost of your conversions is too expensive.
While you are busy improving your site's conversion rate and generating profitable leads, keep in mind that the metric on your CPC should be kept as low as possible.
Focus on the pages with a great history in conversion rates and send your visitors to those landing pages alone. Furthermore, the bids on your keywords should be lower, and if a keyword is not performing well, you can pause it and save on costs.
Average order value (AOV)
Your revenue is significant as the more a consumer spends with you, the more revenue you will generate. Try to get your average order as high as you possibly can by offering upsells and recommending products with a widespread reputation or something similar to their interest. Free shipping over a particular value will cause your consumers to reconsider spending more money, and this action will increase your average order value.
Traffic source revenue
The four primary traffic sources are: organic, referral, direct, and paid.
Organic– The term organic refers to the visitors sent to your site without paid ads, this traffic usually arrives by searching for a particular phrase or keyword that led them to your website then clicking on your link.
Referral– Referral traffic is web traffic that was referred from one website to another, for example, blogs that mentioned you.
Direct– This type of traffic refers to visitors directly typing your URL into their browser.
Paid– Paid traffic refers to visitors who click on advertisements that lead them to your site.
Shopping cart abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment is significant to track; by this result, you are already aware that consumers are interested in your products, but why are they not following through with the payment?
Here are two straightforward strategies to help you lower your shopping cart abandonment rate:
Eliminate unnecessary steps or allow consumers to check out as guests instead of creating an account.
Follow up on your abandoned carts by sending emails to entice shoppers with discounts, if they complete the purchase within a particular time.
Conclusion
A/B testing can be a compelling method to collect information if you are using it resourcefully. Experiment continuously and improve your website's speed, user-friendliness, copywriting, and design choices.
Rely on a data-driven result, and not your assumptions as statistics speak louder than words, and so does your consumers.
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