Benefits Of A/B Testing

The fundamentals of A/B Testing will help direct more traffic to your company web page and increase the conversion rate from viewers of your site to future clients.

Why Should You Perform an A/B Test?

One of the easiest and worthwhile investments into your company’s customer outreach is through A/B testing. The test can allow you to measure subtle differences in your website’s appearance or digital marketing which may offer a big payoff to your company’s bottom line. In order to get optimal results, it would be beneficial to first ask yourself what you are seeking from the test. Most often it will be the conversion rate of customers visiting your site. You can test many other variables though, such as what text works best in an email, what the most effective language a notification will use, or what color scheme on your site is the most pleasing to a viewer. Before running your test though, consider what specific page elements you wish to manipulate.

What Can You Measure with the Test?

The A/B Test can measure two or more different elements on a web page. Viewers to your site will be unaware of the different versions of web pages existing, thus removing potential bias from the test. It is advised to first select the version of your website you would like to use as a control. This version (version A) will be your current web page. The test page, B, becomes your ‘dependent variable’ on whatever metric you are interesting in measuring. After implementing the changes, the site will then randomly direct traffic to one variation of your web page and measure the clicks and time spent on the page. Then the test compares both versions of the page to see which performed better according to your desired criteria. For emails and notifications, you can analyze the response rate of each message. Once you are satisfied with the duration of your test you are free to make changes to your site as needed. Take caution at reading too far into the data, however, as it can be easily skewed.

There is a sweet spot when it comes to the amount of data you are testing. Test too little, and you waste valuable time that could be spent measuring metrics that create more impact. Alternatively, including too many variables in your test could lead to bad data that could negatively impact your web page. Let’s say instead of an A/B test, you run an A/B/C/D test which runs four different headers at the top of your web page. This version of the test is useful when the data you are measuring in more based on user preference. Any number of metrics can be measured at once but keep in mind the risk of acquiring bad data as you increase the amount of metrics analyzed at one time.

A/B Testing in Software Development

Fortunately even with the demanding performance software development requires, there are a few tools available online to help assist with software test. According to conversion rate experts, the two most commonly tools are Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer. These are premium services used by businesses that can be modified to test any metric you are interested in. To an outside observer it would be easy to dismiss the test as time consuming and too high of a cost. Consider the following statistics though, provided by VWO from consumers using their product:

• One out of every seven A/B tests is considered statistically significant.
• Statistically, significant tests can increase customer conversion rate by 49%.
• The average A/B test takes between one week and two months.

It would be worthwhile to test your pages after they have been created since the A/B test may find things that go against your intuition. Be confident in the data you receive from testing rather than relying on instinct alone. Any user experience from your website can be analyzed with a data driven approach. All software development companies utilize this approach to increase their own website traffic and boost the conversion rate of visitors to customers. Sunflower Lab uses the test to analyze our own traffic and target key customers for app development. Contact us today for consulting on performing your own test.