A/B Testing: The Complete Guide
What Can You Test Using A/B Testing?
The A/B testing is a split testing technique to optimize the website and figure out the business strategies that are done online for promotion and marketing Bergbauer, Hanushek and Woessmann 2018). It involves two or more user with part of the page version to one and part to the other through web analytics. The use of A/B testing is done for everything from copying a website to search for ads till sales emails. A huge difference could be made through A/B testing with effective marketing efforts.
When the promotional elements are effectively narrow down it makes the effort of marketing more profitable and successful. Design variations is implemented through A/B testing to compare and identify the better design. It measures the conversions that could be a subscribers, sales, or to sign up. A/B testing has a methodical technique and tools that help in carry out experiments in unobtrusive and fair ways. The multivariate testing is use as a subset for A/B testing with experiments that consider multiple variables. A/B testing is used for website to improve some specific area otherwise there will be a problem that could identify the use of analytics and remove the aspect for the design to like and dislike the experience.
- Test the aspects of a page using A/B testing
The aspects that could be tested for a page with the use of A/B testing are headlines, sub headlines, text of the Paragraph, Action text or Button, Text Paragraph, Links, Images, fold content, social proof, mentions media, badges and awards (Cruz-Benito et al. 2018).
With advance A/B testing sales promotions, length with free trail, structures with pricing, UX and navigation experiences, paid or free delivery
- In relation to SEO and webpage
A/B testing is implicated on SEO in the Google blog post cleared for Google Search and Website Testing. By using A/B testing for a URL that is SEO friendly using a keywords and separating each word by dashes.
A/B testing for a website improve the experience of the customer and convert the existing traffic with the methodologies that keep engage the website longer.
- Hypothesesrole in the process of optimization
An experiment without a hypothesis would gain nothing. The role of hypothesis is important to run an experiment and do the test (Hill et al., 2017). It helps in understanding the statistical significance of the result that is obtain.
- Comparison of pages by A/B testing
Through splitting testing two version of the webpages are compared and will be checked which of the page performs well (Kharitonov, Drutsa and Serdyukov 2017). The figure that is shown below have two variants A and B to the visitors at the same time. The conversion rate of anyone wins.
How Does A/B Testing Relate to SEO and Webpage Optimization?
Figure 1: A/B testing comparison of webpage
Source: (Website, 2018)
- Customers needed for comparison
There are different opinions some comes to mathematics, some to strategy, some depends on business strategy (Gawke, Gorgievski and Bakker 2017). For comparisons of multiple problem the test is done by running cumulative alpha error. By running more of the test variants the probability increases for false positives.
- Team of A/B testing
For e-Commerce website, visitors who buy products can do the A/B testing. For news and media websites, reader are need to click the sign up or ads for the subscription that are paid.
- Advantages and disadvantages of A/B testing
- For advance tuning method use of low-data rate tests (Kohavi and Longbotham 2017)
- Implementation of tools for web analytics for data collected with simple split testing.
- Split test is designed to test and split the traffic available.
- Ease of analysis for statistical tests
- Flexible for values of the variable
- The number of recipes are limited for split testing where test is done one at time.
- The collection of data is inefficient that could draw conclusions that test other variables.
- Multivariate testing
A multivariate testing is performed with elements having subtle test inside one web pages. It give an idea of the web page elements that helps in achieving the page objectives (Brodsky et al. 2017).
In the webpage, the changes that need to be made are discussed below:
A meaningful anchor text if added to the destination of the link for describing. A Meta description if included for all pages of the website will help in controlling the SEO appearance for the pages and article of the website.
There are some of the pages in the website were the headings are not define correctly. It may happen that the visitors may get confused with the convention so H1 tags must be used for top-level heading, H2 tags for sub-heading and H3 tags for sub sub-headings.
- Optimizely: It is the platform for experimentation. Businesses develop personalization and experimentation continuously that gets deliver cross the website, application of the mobile and devices that are connected.
- Zoho PageSense: It provides an approach that are data-driven that helps in understanding the interaction of each visitors with the website. With the use of Zoho PageSense growth accelerates, revenue increases and website conversion are higher.
Figure 2: Sales Funnel
Source: (Zero Gravity Marketing, 2018)
Awareness: Before becoming a customer, the person will be aware about the company
Interest: Interest grows with research by the lead to understand what has offered. Trusts are build and relationships are develop by the brands.
Consideration: Leads might not made up but have interest in the brand. At this stage, tools like free trails, automated emails are used.
Intent: Once lead minds are made up. Items get placed in the shopping cart
Evaluation: Selected items will be compared before last commitment.
Purchase: Finally leads has converted to customer. If there is a positive experience, it may get referrals.
From the study that has been done on the A/B testing it is clear that it is an invaluable resource for the one that make online decisions. A/B resting have a great revenue growth. With diligence and knowledge many risks get mitigate for oprimizers that they face because of the errors.
References
Bergbauer, A.B., Hanushek, E.A. and Woessmann, L., 2018. Testing (No. w24836). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Brodsky, B.S., Owens, G.M., Scotti, D.J., Needham, K.A. and Cool, C.L., 2017. Economic impact of increased utilization of multivariate assay testing to guide the treatment of ovarian cancer: implications for payers. American health & drug benefits, 10(7), p.351.
Cruz-Benito, J., Vázquez-Ingelmo, A., Sánchez-Prieto, J.C., Therón, R., García-Peñalvo, F.J. and Martín-González, M., 2018. Enabling adaptability in web forms based on user characteristics detection through A/B testing and machine learning. IEEE Access, 6, pp.2251-2265.
Gawke, J.C., Gorgievski, M.J. and Bakker, A.B., 2017. Personal Costs and Benefits of Employee Intrapreneurship: Disentangling the Employee Intrapreneurship, Well-Being, and Job Performance Relationship.
Hill, D.N., Nassif, H., Liu, Y., Iyer, A. and Vishwanathan, S.V.N., 2017, August. An efficient bandit algorithm for realtime multivariate optimization. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 1813-1821). ACM.
Kharitonov, E., Drutsa, A. and Serdyukov, P., 2017, February. Learning sensitive combinations of a/b test metrics. In Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (pp. 651-659). ACM.
Kohavi, R. and Longbotham, R., 2017. Online controlled experiments and a/b testing. In Encyclopedia of machine learning and data mining (pp. 922-929). Springer US.
Website. (2018). A/B Testing – The Complete Guide | VWO. [online] Available at: https://vwo.com/ab-testing/ [Accessed 25 Aug. 2018].
Zero Gravity Marketing (2018). Sales/Purchase Funnel. [image] Available at: https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=0d4tvnuR&id=599FC9D632B9497D7E05DBFBCBD002B9B827AF6E&thid=OIP.0d4tvnuRyKMcghpZZtGkDAHaF6&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fv5z0z3xeevv2wlwu22eobrtt-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2fZGMFunnelGraphic_Purchase2.png&exph=717&expw=899&q=sales+funnel+for+purchasing+item&simid=608047164076196881&selectedIndex=8 [Accessed 25 Aug. 2018].