A/B Testing is a term that you might have heard being thrown around, especially when it comes to e-commerce. A/B testing is a way to experiment on end users with your website. It can essentially be seen as changing the way a website looks and operates and seeing how it affects its users.
A/B Testing can be extremely helpful for your business. It gives you the ability to research your existing customers in a subtle way. The results you gather from A/B Testing can tell you a lot about your website as well as your customers. By running these tests, you can find out what really works for your website and product.
It should be said that A/B Testing is not effective unless you can reach a certain amount of views or customers. For this reason, you need to decide how long you might have to run a test for before you get results. If you run a test for too short a time, you run the risk of skewing your results. The same thing might happen if you run the test for too long. Although A/B testing relies on statistical and analytical principles, you don’t need to be a mathematician to use it. There are many services out there that help make it easier to run these tests and gather the data you need.
Some example applications of A/B Testing, aside from e-mail campaigns, include:
– Testing the addition of a slider to your home page in order to draw your visitor’s attention
– Finding how your visitors feel when visiting a certain page — removing important links like navigation may make your users feel trapped
– Learning what SEO practices work for you
– Finding the differences in the way things are worded on your website
There is so much you can learn about your website with A/B Testing. Since every business is different, and every customer is different, this kind of experimenting can really reveal what your customers are looking from you. This opens up more opportunities to tailor your brand to your customers and interact with them. With A/B Testing, your business can get that boost it might have been needing.
For example: A product page.
Variation #1 is the original page, with Variation #2 involving an update to the product’s name. Maybe the product is on sale, so the title is updated to “25% OFF: Product”. With A/B testing, you can show the first variation to half of your customers and the second to the other half. From there, you can directly see how that change might affect your customers.
In this example, the extra text, “25% OFF”, might lead to more conversions. Following this path of thinking, you can then apply the change to the rest of the catalog and see an overall increase in sales.
The end result of A/B testing is a website with higher conversion rates and more precise consumer targeting. A/B testing can basically be thought of as experimenting to find out exactly how to appeal to your customers.
There are a lot of tools out there that adds that functionality to your website. For Magento, we’ve recently had a chance to integrate Blue Acorn’s Optimizely extension. Optimizely uses javascript and cookies to apply variations of your site and to apply those variations to users. The javascript is generated after creating your variations and only needs to be applied to Magento once — any changes made from there are updated to that script automatically.
Optimizely is a great tool for A/B testing on Magento. It’s incredibly user-friendly and integrates easily into a Magento store.
After setting up your optimizely account, you can easily create variations by clicking on elements. You can easily change colors, sizes, and even rearrange your page with a WYSIWYG-like editor. These changes take place almost immediately after saving, and for the most part, don’t seem to slow down your page.
Optimizely also randomly serves your updated page to site visitors evenly across your variations so that your site is tested evenly, along with your control. It does this by storing a cookie on your visitors computers so every subsequent visit for a unique visitor returns to the same variation.
The only cons to A/B Testing in general is that you need to plan your testing along with your promotions. Testing while running a promotion can cause inaccurate results, unless you’re planning to test how a promotion might affect customers. Another thing to consider is that a lot of your changes are more likely to be noticed by returning customers, which can also skew the results, depending on how you look at it.
A/B Testing is great because it allows you to narrow down changes, although slight, that really work keep your customer’s attention and raise conversion rates. With Optimizely, it’s easier to find these changes before actually committing changes.
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