If you aren’t A/B testing, you’re falling behind!

Is your landing page conversion rate not where you want it to be? Sometimes you just need to change things up on your website and get a new look. When you use A/B testing, you have two separate landing pages. Some of your traffic is sent to one page, site “A,” while the rest is sent to site “B.” Each landing page is slightly different, allowing you to gauge and experiment visitor reactions. With A/B testing, you’re able to find the best placement for items on your page, colors, and more to maximize visitor conversions.

How to Make Changes

One of the first things you’ll want to consider when thinking about doing A/B testing is what changes to make. There are a variety of things that you should reposition or completely change on your website that will enhance your conversion rate:

• Change “call-to-action” placement. For example, move your contact form around. This will help you understand what placement helps best with your conversions. Is it better for your landing page to have the contact form in the middle of the page, or on the side.
• Change the copy. Using slightly different wording can make a big difference in how people perceive your company and your landing page. Consider your message and what your audience is expecting.
• Change the offer. Are you able to change the price or offer extras? Consider free shipping, upsells, downsells, or different packages. You could be charging more for your product without it affecting your number of customers!
• Change colors on the page. Different colors evoke different emotions. It may sound strange, but changing your color scheme can affect your conversion rate.

These are just a few options of things you can change when doing your A/B testing, but every website has an endless set of options to test!

Changes Should Have Purpose

Remember as you’re working on A/B testing, all the changes you make need to have a purpose. You should never simply throw together a new landing page just because you feel like it. It’s important to have reasons for testing your new page. It’s as simple as trying out new positioning of the images and forms on your site. However, whatever the reason, make sure you stick to it when executing your new page. With this method you’ll be able to know what change made an effect, rather than haphazardly guessing.

Changes Show You How Customers React

The entire point of A/B testing is to find out how your customers react to different landing pages and find the most optimized page. Sometimes customers will click your “Buy Now” button more if it’s in the middle of the page. Other times, it works best on the right. However, you’ll never know this if you don’t test it. Once you have put out both of your landing pages, you need to wait and let the stats and information come in.

After you start your test, continually monitor your analytics report. You will be able to see how many people are coming into each version and the performance of each. Conversion rate (number of conversions divided by number of visitors) is the most important metric to track. Bounce rates are also crucial when doing A/B testing. If you have changed visual elements, such as color and image placement, bounce rate will play a huge part in the decisions you make for your landing page.

After you’ve collected enough data to declare a winner, it’s time to start again! The process of A/B testing never ends, but it’s great to know you’re always improving!

By Jon Correll