Key Messages
How A/B Testing Can Help Optimize Your Business Website for Maximum Performance
When it comes to setting up an online business, your website is one of the most important things you need to get right.
You want it to look good, be user-friendly, and appeal to potential customers.
So how do you ensure that your website is optimized for success? Through A/B testing!
By using this method, you can gain insight into various elements of your website and discover which works best.
By understanding how others were successful with A/B testing – such as Obama’s presidential campaign – you will learn how to optimize your online presence and draw more customers to your website.
You’ll also find out why sometimes less is more and why even experimentation that don’t work out can still be beneficial in teaching valuable lessons.
A/B Testing: A Proven Technique to Increase Visitor Engagement and Conversion
Do you want to increase the engagement of your website’s visitors? There’s an easy and efficient way to do just that: A/B testing.
With A/B testing, you can show different versions of your site to randomly selected test groups to gather data on which is the most effective.
Using this technology, the Obama campaign found success in 2008 after running a series of tests.
These tests utilized different images and texts, with one example changing the photo to one of Obama surrounded by his family, as well as swapping out the “Sign Up” button for a “Learn More” button.
The results speak for themselves: 2.8 million more email subscribers and an additional $57 million in donations!
Nowadays with platforms like Optimizely, anyone can implement A/B testing with ease – while taking advantage of the huge advantages it offers.
So if you’re looking to optimize your website and maximize visitor engagement, then A/B testing is definitely something that you should consider trying out!
Successfully Optimizing Your Website Starts With Defining Metrics and Hypotheses
It’s essential to have a clear hypothesis and an established definition of success when you are ready to start A/B testing on your website.
Without these two components, it’s hard to know exactly how successful the tests were.
First, define success metrics that are going to track what data is most important and relevant to you.
For instance, if you run an online magazine then it won’t be beneficial for you to use clicks as a metric as it does not provide insight into reader opinion about the content.
Alternately, considering factors like shares, comments or repeat visits could be much more useful in measuring which type of content resonates with readers.
Meanwhile, if you have an ecommerce business then things like purchase completion rate, product pageviews or items added to cart may be better suited for tracking success.
Second, come up with a hypothesis about what outcome the A/B testing should result in.
To illustrate this concept better we can take the example of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund from 2010; initially they assumed that adding a picture above the donation form would increase donations but it had the opposite effect due to readers having to scroll further down than necessary to find the field – hence taking more time.
After re-evaluating their hypothesis they placed the image next to the field instead and this increased donations by over a million dollars!
It’s evident that without forming new hypotheses based on results there wouldn’t have been this optimal outcome and such successes wouldn’t always occur without methodical testing..
A/B Testing Leads Companies to Successful Site Redesigns
A/B testing can be an invaluable tool when it comes to making major changes for your website, as was exemplified by Disney, Chrome and Netflix.
When Disney switched up their TV network’s homepage structure, they managed to increase engagement by 600%, compared to the 10-20% increase in clicks they had been expecting!
This was all due to their A/B test experiment that allowed them to analyze search logs, which helped them realize what exactly visitors were searching for.
Similarly with Chrome, who started with three promotional boxes on their homepage that they wanted to switch up via A/B testing.
To their surprise, the central box always proved most successful regardless of its content – leading Chrome eventually decided upon a completely different site design.
Lastly Netflix used A/B testing while going through a re-designing process in 2011.
What worked best in this case was a variation with near endless rows of movie thumbnails that customers could scroll through – which not only increased retention but engagement too!
All these cases prove just how useful A/B testing can be if you’re looking into exploring major changes for your site.
Less is More: How to Reduce Clutter on Your Website for Maximum Engagement
If you want your website to be user friendly and engage more with users, then decluttering your site design is key.
A/B testing has proven that removing unnecessary fields can make a huge impact on user engagement.
For example, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund used Optimizely to remove fields that were not necessary such as “Phone Number” and “Title”.
The result was a 11 percent increase in donations per page view!
You can also use hide functions when it’s hard to strike out certain fields.
Cost Plus World Market increased their revenue per visitor by 15.6 percent just by using hide functions for promotion code and shopping options in their checkout dialogue.
And if there are elements that can’t be obviated, break them down into multiple pages instead of having them all in one long form.
That’s exactly what Obama’s campaign did when they broke down the donation form into two separate pages which resulted in an extra $190 million dollars in donations!
So if you’re looking for ways to boost user engagement, start by decluttering your site design with A/B testing!
Verbs and Clear Descriptions Are Keys To Increasing Engagement On Your Website Through A/B Testing
When it comes to engaging people, the right language is key.
A/B testing has proven this time and time again.
Language can be used to make clicks clearer and more meaningful, as evidenced by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund donation page – there, by replacing the standard “Submit” button with one that read “Support Haiti” on the donation form made a huge difference in donate amounts per page view.
Verbs are also incredibly effective when it comes to prompting website visitors to take action.
Companies such as LiveChat have swapped out nouns for verbs like “Try It Free” instead of “Free Trial”, increasing their campaign click-through rate by 14.6%.
So it really pays off to think carefully about using the right language on your website, not just images – honing in on what type of words will engage people and make them take action will significantly boost your website’s effectiveness.
Failure is the Secret to A/B Testing Success: How Failed Tests Can Lead to Useful Insights
When A/B testing, it’s important to remember that failure can actually be a blessing in disguise.
When scientists fail to produce positive results from their experiments, they don’t consider that a bad thing—in fact, they often learn more from failure than they do success.
A good example of this is Chrome’s experiment with images vs videos for promoting their urban biking products.
After running a three-month trial period of tests, it was revealed that using a video instead of an image had no significant impact on conversion rates.
Even though the test may have seemed pointless and unhelpful at first glance, it gave Chrome valuable information about how effective video can be.
Knowing what doesn’t work can often become just as helpful as discovering what does!
Then there’s the example of gaming site IGN’s experience with moving the “Video” link in the navigation bar from its original location.
Click-through rates decreased dramatically after making this change―which actually helped IGN realize that most of its users were repeat visitors who relied on the localization of certain links for familiar navigation.
Failures like this can give you tons of insight into your user base and what works and doesn’t work when marketing products or services.
How Evangelism of A/B Testing Can Change Company Culture
If you want to make the case for introducing data-driven approaches in your organization, one of the best ways to do so is to carry out simple A/B tests and show their results.
This will help you demonstrate how effective implementation of A/B testing can be for everyone in the company.
Scott Zakrajsek, the global web analytics manager at Adidas, often runs safe bet A/B tests that quickly result in a clear win to convince colleagues on the importance of data-driven approaches.
He emphasizes the value of continuous improvement via A/B testing and makes it an established part of their policy.
This was Lizzy Allen’s experience when she joined IGN as an analyst in 2010—no one had ever heard of A/B testing.
To get her colleagues engaged she created what she called “The A/B Master Challenge”, which involved having employees predict different A/B test outcomes.
Although they didn’t accurately predict what would work out best, they gained a better understanding and appreciation for data-driven approaches which ultimately led them to incorporate it into their culture.
These experiences illustrate just how important it is that businesses implement data-driven approaches into their operations if they are going to remain competitive and take their profits to the next level..
Wrap Up
A/B Testing is essential if you want to maximize engagement and optimize the performance of your website.
This book serves as a thought-provoking read for everyone who wants to get started with A/B testing and work with data more systematically.
In order to use this data-driven approach effectively, you must have a clear hypothesis and defined success criteria.
Finally, by using an A/B testing platform like Optimizely, you don’t need to hire an entire team of data analysts – everything can be done simply and easily online.
All in all, this comprehensive summary shows that A/B Testing can make all the difference when it comes to ensuring success for your website.
