7 Tips for Effective A/B Testing

‘Always Be Testing’

[Free Takeaway Inside – 42 Affinity Audience Segments]

How often have you come across the same case studies over and over again - “Company XYZ Doubled Conversions by X% with this Button Color Change”?

Have you ever wondered whether such minuscule details such as a slight variation in color, border size or text can really turn metrics around?

Well, Google’s “40 Shades of Blue” experiment is evidence that it can.

In 2009, a team at Google led by Marissa Meyer set out on a mission to discover the perfect shade of blue for their ad links. The idea received much criticism for its statistical approach from designers who believed it was a waste of time and resources. But, the company’s choice of putting data above their design experts’ intuitions resulted in a whopping $200 million profit.

When Google started testing 40 shades of blue and analyzed the CTR for each, it found that a purplish shade of blue had beaten greener hues to amass the most number of clicks.

They used the simple concept of color appeal to encourage users to click on ads and increased their revenue significantly. But most importantly, the experiment served as irrefutable evidence of the power of data and A/B testing.

Instead of taking quantum leaps, the search giant settled to experiment with a small leap of faith only to find low-hanging fruits of conversion rate optimization. And, this turned out to be a game-changer!

However, not all companies can rake in millions of dollars in revenue simply by applying A/B testing as Google did.

As powerful as it may be, A/B testing is tough to crack for most businesses. In fact, statistics indicated that only one in every seven A/B tests ever proved to be successful.

Nevertheless, A/B testing can help you make data-based decisions to increase overall company performance and provide an edge over competitors.

Here are some ways to optimize A/B tests and make it work for you:

1. Adopt a Systemic Approach

Follow a rigorous and structured process to achieve statistical significance and listen to your data.

In a survey conducted by Econsultancy and RedEye, 74% of the survey respondents who used a structured approach to conversion improved their sales.

Here are some golden rules to follow a structured process for your A/B testing strategy:

• Brainstorm ideas for tests with key stakeholders
• Test things that will really move the dial, don’t tinker around the edges
• Compare like with like
• Ensure results are statistically significant and conclusive
• Test everything and assume nothing
• Build up a knowledge base of what worked and what didn’t
• Don’t set and forget, make small tweaks when and where necessary to yield better results
  

2. Focus on User Experience

Identify the bottlenecks in the user journey across your site to understand what makes them click into and away from your portal. Use surveys to gather direct feedback from users and ask subjective or specific questions to uncover their pain points. You can also utilize heatmaps to track users’ movements and extract valuable insights. Together, these insights can be applied to do smart A/B testing that truly impacts the conversion rate.

3. Clearly Define your Success Metric

Before running your test, define one success metric that will set apart the champion variant vs the challenger. Tie your metrics to the goals you want to achieve and ensure that it is not vanity but an actionable metric. Tracking the visitor to customer conversion rate can be challenging if you have a lengthy sales cycle. In such cases, track micro-conversion steps leading to the sales process such as the percentage of visitors who filled forms or the percentage of visitors who downloaded your free ebook.

4. Build a Continuum of Tests

A/B testing is not a one-off exercise that yields positive outcomes in your very first attempt. It’s a continuous process that will only get better with an iterative approach. Build on what you have learned from your previous tests and further optimize your testing strategy. This will help you add up incremental gains in conversions. So plan, test, decide and repeat until all those iterative steps combine to create cumulative success.

5. Determine an Optimal Timeframe to run Tests

The exact timeframe for how long you should run your A/B test will largely depend on the level of traffic your ads or website get. Generally speaking, most experts recommend running A/B tests for at least one to two weeks. A one to two-week snapshot should give you a fair idea of what users prefer as a whole, as each person may be at a different stage in the buyer's journey. This will also enable you to adopt an agile approach to implement changes quickly and further refine your tests by making optimizations on the go.

6. Ensure that Control and Test Groups are balanced

When running A/B tests, you need to display two sets of variants to two sets of audiences – the control and test group. Therefore you may need to broaden your audiences more than usual to avoid under-delivery. Besides, both your control and test groups need to consist of somewhat identical audience segments for statistical relevance. To do this, you need to define your segment, and then randomly assign members to the test and control groups.

7. Embrace and prepare for failed Tests

Ideally, the outcome of an A/B test is an overwhelming “Eureka, I found It!” moment. But, the bitter truth is that most tests fail to produce statistically significant results. In such cases, you can try to distribute your variants to extra traffic, increase the timeframe and if that still doesn’t work you must prepare to embrace failures. With a ‘fail fast approach’ you can learn, iterate and succeed on the next try.

All in all, most successful landing page A/B tests aren’t lucky one-offs—they are the result of a great, methodical testing strategy. While using A/B testing tools can make the process easier and faster, it is not a means to an end for boosting conversion rates instantaneously.

It might take a few tests to yield the kind of results you’re looking for, but with the right testing strategy in place, you can be successful.

So, what sort of results have you seen with your testing efforts? Has a strategic approach helped you improve your conversion rate? Drop your comments below or share your views with us at marketingfolks@xerago.com.

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Created on Aug 21st 2022 23:30. Viewed 141 times.

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