How to Determine Which Parts of Your Website Need A/B Testing

In a perfect world, every single change you make to your website would be made under perfect conditions where you would have ample time to plan, test, and execute each change.

There would never be any rushed deadlines or problems that forced you to make changes on the fly. Unfortunately, that’s not reality, and the result is that you could make a change that causes a negative impact. Finding that negative impact is the real challenge.

After all, it could take a few months for your analytics to show that you have customers falling out of the funnel, or that your shopping cart abandonment rate is creeping up. In addition to this, sometimes your website just needs a tune-up. In either case, you have to be able to identify potential weak points.

Then, you have to identify what might need to be changed, and determine the best way to go forward with A/B testing. Check out the following 5 tips of identifying where your problems might be, and where you should consider A/B testing.

Look at Landing Pages

If you are having performance concerns regarding your website, the first place to look is almost always your landing pages.

After all, this is where your CTA buttons are. As you look at each landing page, here are few things that are often ripe for A/B testing:

• CTA button color text and placement
• Headline
• Trust Badges
• Social Media Share Buttons and Social Proof Placement

Even if you haven’t made recent changes, these elements tend to be the cause of your gaining and losing conversions. Setting same A/B testing scenarios could reveal some very useful information.

Get Feedback From Customers

One way to determine which parts of your website might need further A/B testing is to simply ask customers and visitors to let you know about their experiences.

There are many ways to get feedback. You can create a survey and invite visitors to complete it. You can also send the survey out to email list subscribers, and as a follow up for customers who have made a purchase.

Keep in mind that just because somebody has converted, that doesn’t mean that their experience on your website was completely smooth. Their feedback could be quite valuable in helping you find trouble spots and start A/B testing possible solutions.

Use Heat Maps

Heat mapping is a type of analytics that let you know which parts of each web page are getting more focus and attention and which are being ignored.

If you’ve ever seen a picture of brain activity where the most active parts of the brown are lit up in red, somewhat active parts in yellow, and other parts in green, you’ve seen a kind of heat map.

You can use heat maps to determine what web content is being ignored and what is getting a lot of focus. If you have images, headlines, calls to action, or other important content that are not getting focus, you might consider making changes, and launching some A/B testing.

Keep a Change Log

As mentioned above. In an ideal world, every change would be fully vetted before being published. Unfortunately, you can’t always do that. However, what you can do is establish a strict policy that every single change to a web page is documented.

This should include the time and date stamp information, who made the change, the reason for the change, and a description of the change. This way, even if a change was rolled in as part of an emergency fix, for example, it can be closely scrutinized later on.

Then, it can be determined whether or not the change could have an unintentionally negative impact, and the designer can set up some A/B testing scenarios to ensure the change works as planned.

Review Pages Where You Have Made Changes to Font or Color

Never discount the impact that changes to font and color can have. Both of these elements are absolutely critical when it comes to the user experience.

Make a wrong call here, and you will increase your bounce rate significantly, and motivate your customers to bounce in droves.

If you have made any change like this, it should ideally be A/B tested as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. This is especially true if you have moved to a serif font, as that can have a detrimental effect on readability.

However, changes in font size and color should also be tested. If you have changed to color of any existing links or buttons, consider A/B testing those as well.

Look at Pricing And Special Offers

One thing you want to make sure that is perfectly clear, and appealing to visitors is any content that relates to pricing and special offers.

You can run into significant trouble if this content is confusing, or construed to be misleading in anyway. Find pages that discuss price and special offers, and consider setting up some A/B testing.

A/B testing gives you the opportunity to find, and publish the best possible version of a change to one of your pages.

It’s always a good idea to spend some time revisiting web pages that are of particular importance, and using testing to make sure they are performing like they should.