Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness With A/B Testing | Varn

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1 May 2015

Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness With A/B Testing

When someone visits your website you want them to be interested, engaged and motivated to go on a pre-prescribed journey through a process, all the way to the sales conversion.

If they do not – then you have a serious business-critical problem. So how do you test and experiment, without compromising your website, to know what works? One way is A/B Split Testing.

This method gives you the ability to scientifically test and validate decisions you have made on design, content, messaging and the layout. You can access this through Google Analytics’ ‘Content Experiments’.

Know Your Goals

It’s important to know your goals before embarking on A/B testing. It can be a great method for instance, to improve conversions, newsletter sign-ups, downloads, user generated content etc.

It’s also important to know the changes you are measuring. It could be a single element or the whole layout. Is it where you are putting the ‘sign up’ button, or the ‘buy now’ button, or is it the colours you are using on them? It’s worth testing elements such as the ‘call to action’ button, where it is positioned, its colour and its size. You might be surprised how much a difference little design elements like this affect the amount of people clicking on it.

Also consider testing the headline, slogan and product description, promotional offers, images you are using, lengths of fields and also how much copy is used on the page – maybe making it shorter or longer will affect changes in visitor behaviour?

To get the clearest results we have found that you need to check two radically different designs to the whole page to test how formats compare.

A/B testing is not as widely used as it probably should be. At its heart this is a simple scientific experiment to see what works best.

A vs B Website Testing

You and your team may well have ideas about how to improve the performance of your website but without testing, it’s only guesswork. An A/B test works simply by creating two versions of the webpage – version A (the control) and version B (the variation). Exposing them both to live traffic will then determine which gets the best results you are seeking. It might be something as simple as changing the colour of your page that leads to a variation of user interaction.

Getting Closer To Your Customers’ Needs

A/B testing on your website is all about researching the best hooks for your customers and by doing so you will be a step closer to understanding exactly how your customer thinks – arguably, the most valuable lesson in business.

Contact the team at Varn to run A/B testing experiments for you.

Article by: Tom, CEO of Varn More articles by Tom

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