What is A/B testing?

CIIM.IN – Landing page training course in Chandigarh. where students can learn A/B testing approach, Conversion optimization and Landing page designing. A/B testing is the act of running a simultaneous experiment between two or more pages to see which performs or converts the best. Despite the name (A/B testing), the experiment can be conducted with as many pages as desired.

Once you have decided what to test on your landing page (e.g. headline, call to action, photography, adding a video etc.) – you can create new versions (or variants) of your page to enter into the experiment.

Naming Conventions

Champion page
When you complete a test, you decide upon a winner (the page with the best conversion performance). This is the champion page.

Challenger page(s)
When starting a test, you create new versions (variants) to challenge the existing champion page. These are called challengers.

Page variant
This is a term for any new version of your landing page included in the test. The champion and any challenger pages are all variants.

Assigning traffic weight in an A/B test

Traffic is randomly assigned to each page variant based upon a predetermined weighting – for example, if you are running a test with 2 page variants, you might split the traffic 50/50 or 60/40. Visitors are typically cookied so that they will always see the same version of the page (to maintain the integrity of the test). The main factor that decides how much weight you would ascribe to your page variants during a test is timing – whether you are starting the test with multiple variants at the same time or testing new ideas against an established page.

Starting with multiple page variants

If you are starting a campaign from scratch and have several ideas about which direction to take, you can create a new landing page variant for each idea. In this scenario you would most likely assign equal weight (traffic) to each page. The reason being that you want to treat them equally and pick a winner (champion) as soon as possible. You need to drive a certain amount of traffic through test pages before the results are statistically significant or valid, and as you have no conversion data on any of the pages, it makes sense to begin your experiment from a position of equality.

Testing against a pre-existing page

If you have an established page that you want to try some new ideas out on, you would give your new page variants a smaller percentage of traffic than the existing champion to mitigate the risk inherent with introducing new ideas (which may not perform well).

What Should I Test on My Landing Pages?

A/B testing is both an art and a science. It’s also very unpredictable. Most marketing departments, usability specialists, designers and management rely on a mixture of experience, gut instinct and personal opinion when it comes to deciding what will work better for their customers. Be prepared to throw all the boardroom conjecture out the window and start achieving real insight into what works and what doesnʼt – testing, like a camera, never lies.

At the end of the day, it’s your customers and your brand (your brand is what your customers think you are, rather than what you say you are) that will decide what converts the best. With that being said, there are a certain number of landing page elements that you can attack in your testing. The different variations and content that goes into the test is up to you, which one works the best (whether you like it or not) is up to the customers.

Some of the elements you should consider testing are:

• The main headline (which typically contains a succinct rendering of your product/offer/service core value proposition).
• The call to action (CTA) – typically the text on the button that represents your page’s conversion goal.
• Hero shot. Try a variation of your main photo (if you have one) – preferably showing your product or service being used in context.
• Button design. Use design principles to accentuate the appearance of your CTA (contrast, whitespace, size). Above all, try making it bigger.
• Button color – green for go, blue for link color, orange or red for emotional reaction.
• Form length. For lead capture and other form usage, you will want to minimize the amount of fields that visitors are required to complete. However, if you have a particularly strong need for data, try running an A|B|C|D|E test with varying amounts of information gathering. This way you can make an informed decision about what abandonment rate is acceptable when weighed against the extra data produced.
• Long copy vs. short copy. Often shorter is better, but for certain products detail is important in the decision making process. Test it and see.