What is A/B Testing?

A/B Testing

In the online world, the number of visitors on your website equals the number of opportunities you have to expand your business by acquiring new customers and build relationships by catering to existing ones. It is your conversion funnel that decides whether your website gets good traffic and converts more visitors.

Businesses want visitors to take action (also called a conversion) on their website, and the rate at which a site can drive this is called its “conversion rate.” The more optimized your funnel, the higher is the conversion rate. One of the most important ways to optimize your website’s funnel in digital marketing is A/B testing.

Typically, in A/B testing, the variant that gives higher conversions is the winning one, and that variant can help you optimize your site for better results.

The metrics for conversion are unique to each website. For eCommerce, it may be the sale of the products, while for B2B, it may be the generation of qualified leads. A/B testing is one of the components of the overarching process of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). You can gather qualitative and quantitative user insights and use them to understand your potential customers and optimize your conversion funnel based on that data.

Why Should You A/B Test?

If B2B businesses today are unhappy with all the unqualified leads they get per month, eCommerce stores, on the other hand, are struggling with a high cart abandonment rate. Meanwhile, media and publishing houses are also dealing with low viewer engagement. These core conversion metrics are affected by some common problems like leaks in the conversion funnel, drop-offs on the payment page, etc.

Let’s see why you should do A/B testing to deal with all these problems:

Why should you A/B Test

Solve Visitor Pain Points

Visitors on your website come to achieve a specific goal that they have in mind. It may be to understand more about your product or service, buy a product, read/learn more about a particular topic, or simply browse. Whatever the user’s goal, they may face some common pain points while achieving their goal: it can be a confusing copy or hard to find the CTA button like buy now, request a demo, etc.

Not being able to achieve their goals leads to a bad user experience. This increases friction and eventually impacts your conversion rates. Use data gathered through visitor behavior analysis tools such as heatmaps, Google Analytics, and website surveys to solve your visitors’ pain points. This stands true for all businesses, be it eCommerce, travel, SaaS, education, or media and publishing.

Get Better ROI from Existing Traffic

As most marketers have come to realize, the cost of acquiring any quality traffic can be huge. A/B testing lets you make the most out of your existing traffic and helps you increase conversion without having to spend on acquiring new traffic. A/B testing can give you high ROI as sometimes, even the most minor changes can result in a significant increase in conversions.

Reduce Bounce Rate

One of the most important metrics to be tracked to judge your website’s performance is its bounce rate. There may be many reasons for your website’s high bounce rate, such as too many options, expectations mismatch, and so on. As different websites serve different goals and cater to different audiences, there is no sure-shot way of fixing the bounce rate. One way to do it is through A/B testing. With A/B testing, you can test multiple variations of your website’s element till you find the best possible version. This improves your user experience, making visitors spend more time on your site and reduce bounce rates.

<5>Make Low-risk Modifications

Make minor, incremental changes to your web page with A/B testing instead of getting the entire page redesigned. This can reduce the risk of jeopardizing your current conversion rate. A/B testing lets you target your resources for maximum output with minimal modifications, resulting in increased ROI. An example of that could be product description changes. You can perform an A/B test when you plan to remove or update your product descriptions. You do not know how your visitors will react to the change.

A/B testing is one way to ascertain which side the weighing scale will tilt. Another example of low-risk modification can be the introduction of a new feature change. Before introducing a new feature, launching that new feature as an A/B test in the web page’s copy can make the outcome much more predictable. It can be very useful beneficial if the changes affect customer data or purchase funnel. Changes without testing may or may not pay off. Testing and then making changes can make the outcome certain.

Achieve Statistically Significant Improvements

A/B testing is completely data-driven with no room for guesswork, gut feelings, or instincts. You can easily determine a “winner” and a “loser” based on statistically significant improvements on metrics like time spent on the page, number of demo requests, cart abandonment rate, click-through rate, and so on.

Profitably Redesign your Website

Redesigning can range from a minor text or color tweak in a CTA button to completely revamping a webpage. The decision to implement one version or the other should always be based on data-driven A/B testing. Do not quit testing with the design being finalized. As the new version goes live, test other web page elements to ensure that the most engaging version is visible to the visitors.