The Ins and Outs of A/B Testing

Getting websites that convert can take a lot of trial and error and one of the best ways to figure out what appeals to your target demographic is through A/B testing.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is when you offer your site users the same page/content with slight variations, to see if one performs better than the other. For example, you might create a form with different color buttons to see which color gets more clicks. Or testing out two different images to see which image performs better. Users randomly are presented the different options and results are tracked within your analytics.

Why use A/B testing?

Most websites have goals for user interaction and testing different variants allows you to figure out which option gets you the most results. Because the more interaction, submissions, or contacts you can get, the better.

What if you found out that adding a border on your form made people submit it more? Or if moving the phone number to the left made people call more? You’d want to do those things? That’s what A/B testing does.

Sounds great! How do I do it?

There are lots of ways to do this. An easy way is to use Google Optimize. You add your account and link it to your Google Analytics account and then create an experiment. You can choose a lot of options – change text, change color, remove elements, relocate items. When you’ve made the changes you want to test, you insert a script in the head of that page and start your experiment. Then you wait and see what happens.

Then you wait and see the results.

How long should I run the experiment?

This really depends on how much traffic your site gets. If it’s a low traffic site, it may take awhile to get enough data to see a definitive result.

Have some fun and set up some experiments and see if you can find any variants that make a difference in your website performance!