The more value a business provides to its customers, the more its chances of succeeding. A/B testing allows online businesses to provide value by effectively measuring the impact of their marketing and advertising campaigns. It enables making well-informed and data-based decisions. 

This blog discusses solid information on “what is A/B testing?” “Why is it important for business growth?” and “how can you perform an A/B test?’.

What is A/B testing?

Source: NotifyVisitors

A/B testing is a technique where two versions of an element of a marketing element are compared with each other for performance. The component which is tested may be a landing page, call-to-action, headline, ad text, text color, font style, or something else. The two variations are displayed to two different groups of the audience to analyze which one converts more of them. 

When you look at the analytics, you’ll be able to understand which of the variants attracted more customers. This will help you modify your strategy to create more appealing content for your target audience.

Why is A/B testing important for business growth?

Source: NotifyVisitors

Now that you know the answer to the question “What is A/B testing?”, it’s time you get to know those ways in which it can help in growing your business. 

1. Allows testing everything

Various elements on your site affect user engagement and conversion rates. With A/B testing, you can test anything from content, images, form, CTA, colors, styling, fonts, etc. This helps you identify what works and what doesn’t, and thereby, you can create the right mix of elements in your marketing materials. 

2. Improves user engagement

A/B testing allows you to evaluate every aspect of your marketing material. You can come up with variables of elements such as headline, images, content length, CTA, and more. When you test those against each other and find the best performer, you can make improvements. This in turn will improve user engagement. 

HubSpot found that their desktop users who used their search bar converted higher. However, only a small percent of people used their search bar. So, the firm decided to A/B test its site’s search bar for its visual prominence and functionality. It came up with three variants. 

The first had an increased visual prominence and a placeholder text “search by topic”. The second had these two features along with the search function searching the entire site. And the third had an increased visual prominence and a placeholder text “search the blog”, and the search function searched the blog alone, rather than the entire site.

They found that the third variant brought in 6.46% more user engagement with the search bar and a 3.4% increase in conversions. 

3. Reduces bounce rates

Many times, online businesses find that a lot of their visitors bounce from their site. It disheartens them when they see people leaving their site without spending time there. In such cases, A/B testing can help. It’ll help you test different elements and combine the winning candidates to provide them with value. This will reduce your bounce rates. 

4. Ease of analysis

Unlike many other analytic tools that give you just raw numbers, A/B testing gives you straightforward metrics. It helps you determine the winning and losing variant of an element without any clumsiness. The clarity of these stats also helps in making well-informed decisions.

5. Helps identify Issues

Oftentimes, the reason behind the failure of many marketing campaigns are minor errors. A/B testing helps in identifying these errors so that they can be eliminated and a good user experience can be delivered. This is crucial because a good design can dramatically boost conversions. 

6. Generates quick results

Many analytical tools require you to test your collateral with a huge audience. But this is not the case with A/B testing. It gives you significantly actionable results even for a relatively small sample. This facilitates making optimization decisions fast.

7. Saves money

A/B testing allows online businesses to save money by recognizing processes that bring better returns. For, they can eliminate those low-performing processes, and thereby, save money. They can also spend the money on those productive processes to increase returns on investment.

8. Reduced risks

A/B testing keeps you away from making expensive, time-intensive, and ineffective alterations to your marketing collateral. It helps you make well-informed decisions. This helps avoid mistakes that would have brought negative outcomes. 

9. Reduce cart abandonment

E-commerce businesses can lower cart abandonment via A/B testing. For, it can help them improve the user experience provided by their site through the purchasing and checking out process. This reduces potential customers from abandoning their carts and this increases e-commerce sales. 

10. Increases profits

AB testing increases engagement, lowers bounce rates, reduces expenses, and improves conversions. This in turn increases sales and profits generated therefrom.

How to perform A/B testing?

Source: NotifyVisitors

A/B testing isn’t rocket science. Any website owner can do it. You just need an idea of how it’s done. So, here are the steps involved in A/B testing. 

1. Get ideas

The hardest part of A/B testing is determining what to A/B test. The easiest way to get ideas is to visit your competitors’ sites and find areas where they excel. These could be potential places for improving your site. So, list these elements for A/B testing on your site. For instance, the “buy now” button on their site is bigger and in a brighter color, the shipping info is prominently displayed on the home page, the image on the home page is captivating, etc. 

2. Hypothesis 

Now come up with assertions to be tested. For example, the buy now button should be bigger and brighter in color and should be displayed prominently to attract the attention of buyers; if the image on the home page is replaced by a more convincing one, more people would convert; etc. to improve customer experience. 

3. Determine the variable

For each element, come up with the two variants that you’d like to test against each other to determine the better performer.  One of them can even be the original version on your site. 

4. Establish parameters

Decide the volume of visitors and duration of time needed for conducting a reliable test. Make sure that you keep all website elements other than the variable being tested identical to yield well-founded results.

5. Conduct the test 

Many software products are available over the net for A/B testing. They don’t require users to have technical knowledge. They have features for creating variations of your website easily with a handy editor. Some like NotifyVisitors even have integration with a heat mapping tool to let you visually analyze your visitors’ behavior. 

6. Keep innovating 

A modification you did to your site post an A/B test could prove to be highly successful. However, don’t let this short-term success suppress your innovativeness. Keep on optimizing your site through incremental improvements. This will help you reap richer and greater rewards. 

Wrapping up

While A/B testing may sound quite complex and technical, it’s not. That’s why we came up with this blog for you. It has not only answered your question “What is A/B testing?” but also discussed why it’s important for growing your business and how it can be done. So, start A/B testing to find what works and what doesn’t when it comes to marketing for your target audience.

Author Bio

Shivani Goyal:

Shivani is a content writer at NotifyVisitors. She writes SEO articles, blogs, and guest posts for businesses to improve website ranking on SERP. She follows a balanced approach to the quality of content and its marketing. She loves to do creativity, although she had an English major in her graduation.