How to Perform A/B Testing

A/B testing (or split testing) is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. Comparison of two web pages is done by showing the two variants (let's call them A and B) to similar visitors at the same time. The one that gives a better conversion rate, wins!

Performing A/B testing that directly compares a variation against a current experience & brings your focus about changes required to be made to your website or app, and then collect data about the impact of that change.

Testing takes the guesswork out of website optimization and enables data-informed decisions that shift business conversations from "we think" to "we know." By measuring the impact that changes have on your metrics, one can ensure that every change produces positive results.

There are many ways to perform A/B testing but the best among them are listed below:

• Testing the Navigation Bar

  Determine which specific pages of your website attract the most customers. Those are the pages to be optimized to drive more traffic.

• Switch the order of your site navigation bar and measure which order brings in the highest number of clicks for the pages that are most important for converting leads to customers. Or, if you don't want to do a navigation bar reorder, you may work on optimizing the copy on your navigation items to compare which version gets more clicks.

• Test Your CTA (Call to Action) Button

• One of the most simple and obvious ways to impact conversion rates is to run some tests on your call-to-action buttons. You can make tons of changes like color, copy, font, shape, placement -- all which seem minor but could actually impact visitors' behaviors to a great extent.
• For example, changing the color of the CTA button can increase the clicks on the button from 10% to 33%. In the world of website optimization, that’s huge.
  

• Test Your Content Offers

   You may highlight the most popular content offers on your homepage in order to observe if there is any change in the attention received by your page. However, it's hard to determine which offers will be the most popular for your homepage -- after all, the traffic you get to your homepage is different than the traffic to, say, a blog post.

• To determine which offers brings in the most leads or even the most customers, try swapping out the offers you feature to see which ones perform best, which is another highlight of A/B testing.
• And, once you've determined which offers are the best to highlight, you can even test shifting the order of these resources to determine how you can get the highest click-through rate for those assets that convert best for your website.
  

• Test Your Headlines

• Headlines are the main text featured on your homepage, so it makes sense to invest some time testing what the best copy or styling is. You can calculate visitor engagement, or measure clicks on the CTA. Changes in headlines promote more clicks on your page.
• This could be because the headline is more concise and the sub header includes bolded words to clearly communicate the product's value - but hey, you never know what'll work for your headlines. Which is why we do A/B testing, Right?

Several factors come into play including a company's industry, the target demographic, and product or service offering that all impact why one variation works better than others. The bottom line is that data should drive every decision regarding changes to your website’s A/B testing.

If you think there might be a better way to present information on your homepage, it’s worth testing.