Why You Should Always A/B Test Your Website

By Ryan Boog

Are you A/B testing? You should be. Every minute of every day. Why? Well, the short answer is it's a way to continuously improve your site. If your company isn't A/B testing your site right now, you need to copy this URL and send this to whom it may concern ASAP to get them in the loop. There are ALWAYS ways to improve the elements of your website.

Let’s talk more about the power of A/B testing.

Why You Should Always A/B Test Your Website

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is an experiment for testing a change on your website. Variant A is usually the original and Variant B is the change you want to test. 50% of the subjects will see Variant A, and 50% will see Variant B.

Example:

Changing the color of a button on your site. You are deciding if the button should stay red or be switched to bright blue.

Variant A (original):

variant a

Variant B: (potential)

variant b

Then, by looking at the statistics you can see which button received more clicks. Did the bright blue pop and get people’s attention or should you stick with the original?

What are the benefits of A/B testing?

The ability to test certain parts of your site is priceless.

By A/B testing you can:

Reduce bounce rate
Improve click-through rates
Create better, more persuasive content
Increase time on page
Provide a better customer experience
Increase conversion rate
Improve customer navigation
Get rid of clutter that your users ignore
Ability to predict users intent on the site
Increase signups
Refine your site

HOW TO A/B TEST YOUR SITE?

Establish what you want to improve
How can you improve this? Color, wording, position
Choose one variation and create an experiment
Test this for at least a month (depending on the amount of traffic your site gets)
Record your findings
Retest again

Picking a program to use for A/B testing.

You can use Google Optimize . Or services like: Optimizely or AB Tasty .

All of these programs will make it easy to change things on your site while tracking the data.

How to A/B Test your site using Google Optimize

Create campaign
Add URL of the page you wish to alter
Create experiment
Create variant
Remove things, change font, text size, copy, images, spacing, background, etc.
Save your changes in the variant
Link your Optimize to the Google Analytics account
Schedule a start and stop date (at least one month)

Are you ready to start A/B testing but not sure where to start? Contact the team at Hoist.