The Benefits of A/B Testing for Website Optimization
Flexibility is the main advantage of using a website to promote a business compared to other marketing channels. For example, if you printed thousands of brochures, you won’t be able to change a headline, piece of text, or color. You need to print thousands of brochures again and spend much money. But if you want to change a headline or piece of content on your site, it will cost you almost nothing. On the other hand, one successful experiment can boost purchases or other website conversions.
How to define a successful solution for your business website? Digital marketers use A/B tests that allow for finding the best solution. This article explains A/B testing and its benefits for website owners and digital marketing beginners.
What is an A/B test?
A/B testing or split testing is the manageable process of comparing two web page versions (usually called A and B) to see which performs better.
Modern web and web tracking technologies allow showing two variants of pages to similar visitors at the same time. In practice, half of the website visitors see version A, while the other half see version B. If one generates more conversions, it will be considered a winner.
A/B tests are used widely in digital marketing to test emails, online ads, webpage headlines or subheadlines, copy, calls to action, other important UI design elements, images, color palettes, and more. This article considers the benefits of A/B tests for website optimization.
Digital marketers use A/B testing when they notice low conversion rates, losing potential customers on some sales funnel stages, high bounce rates, and other conversion issues.
A/B testing is a more predictable and affordable way to identify the best option for website optimization than other marketing approaches like surveys or focus groups. You should know that using A/B tests have cons, but now look at its benefits.
What are the benefits of website A/B Testing?
Business owners often ask, “Should I invest in A/B tests?” The short answer is “Yes” because it is cheaper than losing customers and wasting money on the next website redesign. Several A/B testing benefits are listed below that help you achieve business goals with your site.
Solve visitor pain points
Visitors spend time finding a website and achieving their goals on the website. Maybe they need to know more about the product or service, buy the product, or get a consultation.
But if visitors face some troubles while browsing your website, such as a confusing copy or hard-to-find CTA button, they will leave the website. As a result, their pain points won’t be solved. It is a failure because the business will not be associated with one that can help and solve problems.
A/B testing defines the ways to increase conversion rates
An A/B test allows digital marketers to understand what exactly is converting visitors into customers and what is not working as expected. For example, a copywriter created two excellent copies for a product page. Which one will convert visitors better? A/B test can answer this question.
Even more, A/B testing is a great way to re-evaluate your copies, images, headlines, and calls to action. Look at this image.
As you can see, the “Make you money” message led to more conversions in 2019 than the “Save you money” message. But in 2020, it changed. People wanted to save money instead of making them.
So, if you notice a decline in the conversion rate, you can test other variants of marketing messages or calls to action. The market is a dynamic environment. It makes sense to re-evaluate headlines, webpage copies, and CTAs.
A/B testing reduces bounce rates
Goals were set up in Google Analytics, but you still see a high bounce rate and no conversions. It means the webpage content, design, or call to action is irrelevant to your website visitors. Is the bounce rate important? The short answer is “Yes!” You can learn about the bounce rate and its importance in this article.
A/B test is a good way to find an optimal solution to improve the bounce rate of business site pages. You can reword some marketing messages or calls to action, change the page layout, or add some information. A/B tests will help you understand what works better for visitor engagement and reduce bounce rates.
It is F5 Studio’s Google Analytics report, and you can see that service pages have a 0% of bounce rate.
You should know that bounce rate is defined differently in Google Universal Analytics and GA4. In Google Analytics 4. In Universal Analytics, the bounce rate is the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only one page and triggered only one request to the Analytics server. In GA4, the bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions.
It means that GA4 provides a more useful way of measuring the level at which customers engage with your site pages. But you need to rethink your data collection in terms of the GA4 model because its reports do not display Category, Action, and Label.
Anyway, reducing the bounce rate is a high-priority job if you want to convert visitors into customers on the website.
A/B testing reduces risks and excludes the HiPPO effect
From time to time, website owners or digital marketers want to provide significant changes in layouts, copies, or brand identity on their websites. But it is risky to change something because some changes can cause negative results. A/B testing helps to understand which changes will cause positive results and which changes might affect negatively.
Also, using A/B tests allows for excluding the HiPPO effect. HiPPO effect is an acronym that means Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It is noted that the highest-paid person’s opinion is given more consideration when a team makes decisions related to the website design, marketing messages, and brand identity. Irrational factors such as biases, previous experience, and intuition of this person affect the ability of the team to make the best decision for a business. A/B tests help to avoid ineffective decisions because they provide more information than gut feeling.
A/B tests allow making more money
Finally, A/B tests help to make more profit.
First, business owners can save money because they can avoid wrong decisions related to website design changes, rewording copies, image changes, or rephrasing calls to action.
Second, A/B tests help to find breakthrough ideas and make optimal decisions that lead to a significant profit increase.
At the same time, A/B tests are the cheapest way to check digital marketing hypotheses and collect insightful information about customers’ behavior.
How to do A/B testing
In this section, you will learn about the main steps of a typical A/B testing process.
Data gathering
Before the optimization hypothesis is defined, the team of marketers should gather data and define problems and goals. Data helps to understand users and the ways they interact with the website. Data allows for identifying the main problems, i.e., the stages where the website loses potential customers.
Modern web tracking tools like Google Analytics gather many valuable details about your users, such as website visitors’ location and demographic, used technologies and devices, and their behavior on the website.
Also, digital marketers may use additional tools and ways like heatmaps, surveys, and interviews.
Customer reviews on the website or sources such as TrustPilot or Yelp can also be great data sources.
The hypothesis defining
When the marketing team gathers and analyzes data to identify stages where the website loses potential customers, it is time to define optimization opportunities. Then the team turns these opportunities into hypotheses. Usually, it looks like this: “If we implement changes the element 1, the metric Y will increase by X%.”
The marketing team should prioritize hypotheses to choose which may bring better results without significant investments.
Creating A and B variants and testing them
Now designers and copywriters can create pages A and B that will be tested.
The marketing team has to provide designers and copywriters with clear tasks. Otherwise, they will create layouts and copies that the team wouldn’t expect.
The marketing team can run the test as versions A and B are created. Usually, digital marketers use free Google Optimize or paid Google Optimize 360 for enterprise projects. But you can use any A/B testing tool that suits your needs. A/B testing tools allow you to set tests in minutes.
Also, these tools gather data and allow identify valid results that and not based on random chance.
Result analysis
Many A/B testing tools visualize results with reports. So, the marketing team, business owners, or stakeholders can see changes and make decisions. In some cases, you need to run several tests. In some cases, you find a solution that may increase the conversion rate by 100% or 500%.
Also, as I wrote above, you can get valuable information about your customers without investing in additional marketing research.
When you get satisfactory results with A/B testing, you can decide to implement the best variant.
Conclusions
A/B testing takes the guesswork out of digital marketing and business because all decisions are based on data. It saves the time and money of business owners and digital marketers.
And although the description of the A/B testing looks easy, this approach has many nuances hidden from beginners. That is why hiring professional digital marketers who specialize in A/B testing would be better. Also, hiring professional UI and UX designers for your website design increases the chances of getting a successful site with a high conversion rate for your business.
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