AB Testing Guide for Beginners

Welcome to the Beginners AB Testing Guide. Let’s get started with the basics

Every website out there, the primary goal is to derive conversions. Conversions may be in any form, it may be a sale, newsletter signup or any other action which would benefit the business. So for Businesses, in order to generate more leads and conversions, AB test is needed. Now you may have a question, what is AB testing?

Let’s see the AB testing guide for Beginners

Introduction

AB Testing is a literal comparison of two variations of the same web page to visitors, in order to find which page is performing better. That’s pretty simple. For eg Let’s say there are two different landing pages for the same website. The first 50 visitors will see version A landing page (can use existing version) and the second 50 visitors will see the version B landing page.

Then we can easily find out which is performing good by seeing the conversion rate, bounce rate and session time. Here in the above case, the conversion rate is higher for version B than version A.

The variation between the two versions needs not to be entirely different. You can change Call To Action (CTA) text, its location and Button color and its surrounding for two web pages. You need to run two versions of web pages simultaneously for better results. The audience number should be more and time should be at least 1 week.

For better accuracy, you need to run AB testing on change with one thing. For eg, you can show different Titles( for the same content) for same web page and can find which one has more Click through rate.

Testing with more than one thing at a time, such as headline and call to action, is a multivariate test and is more complicated to run.

AB Testing Working: Step by Step

1. Research on Conversion Funnel

First of all, find what is the stopping point of your conversion funnel using tools like Google Analytics, Heat maps, and surveys. It helps you to get a clear picture of user behavior and activities. So once you find out the stopping point move to the second step.

2. Create variations based on hypothesis assumption

Then create hypothesis assumptions based on the above research. Create variations on web pages according to the hypothesis, You can test the existing version of the web page to the new ones for AB testing.

3. AB Testing

Before Testing, make sure you are going to test with enough no of visitors. And most importantly the AB test should last at least 1 week but not more than 3 weeks for better accurate results. Then Launch AB testing.

4. Analyze the results

Find better performing variation and implement it further. If you consider the Information is not enough, then do the AB test further with the gained insights.

Things you can AB test

The things/elements that you can AB test is as follows

• Call to Action button design, text, and color
• Headlines
• Subheadings
• Links
• Images
• Testimonials
• Changing CTA, image locations

Reference: VWo

This is the guide for Beginners, Advanced AB testing with live example will be shown in future.

Please check out my latest blog post on How to use Screaming Frog SEO spider to improve On page SEO

Please leave your valuable comments below.

Cheers,

Sujithbeno