According to some statistics done recently, both your business and your brand are highly recognised and represented online. The online assets you have and the marketing strategy you have employed will either make or break your business. Your main goal should always be to deliver an impressive digital experience to your site’s visitors. A/B testing will have a significant effect on the performance of your online assets. If it is done consistently, it will improve the effectiveness of the marketing strategies you have and the ROI.
A/B testing is a method where two versions of a particular website or app are compared against each other to see which one is better in performance. Statistical analysis is what is used to decide which variation has a better performance for a particular conversion goal.
How A/B Testing works
Ideally, in this test, you take an app or a webpage screen and then adjust it a bit to essentially create another version of the same page. The change or alteration can be anything from a button to a redesign of your whole page. Once that is done, half of your website traffic is shown the modified version while the other half is shown the original version of the page.
The engagement of the two different pages is then collected and measured in analytics dashboard and later analysed using a statistical engine. From the analysis, you can then easily tell whether the change in experience was positive, negative or had no effect on the website’s visitor numbers.
What can you test?
With A/B Testing, you can basically test anything that is in your website that you feel has an effect on the visitors. Some of the things you can test include;
- Testimonials
- Call to Action Buttons
- Images
- Links
- Social Proof
- Paragraph tests
- Media mentions
A/B Testing Tools that will help you improve your online presence
This is a popular multivariate tool that is very simple to use. It analyses data and then transforms it to a report that is clear to understand. It is great because it also integrates other useful A/B testing tools such as SiteCatalyst, Kissmetrics and Crazyegg. Optimizely’s software significantly helps optimize the customer experience. It has a testing product that is used for both the mobile versions and desktop for your website. It also has testing solutions used for iOS APPS.
The platform gives most business the ability to run multivariate testing, A/B testing and multipage. It has a click editor and a visual point that enables users that have no coding experience to enjoy a full range of customisation. This tool enables you to track conversions, engagement, clicks and sign ups. It also allows you to track other important conversion metric. Ideally, this platform turns all your creative changes into generated and deployed code.
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Unbounce
Unbounce is a A/B testing tool that mainly focuses on convertible tools and landing pages. This is basically a landing page creating tool. However, it also allow any of the users to run A/B tests. Landing pages are a great way to build some hype around a product and engage with the dormant customers. The landing page however does not always reflect what the customer thinks of your product or idea. With few conversions, you can easily be convinced that your idea is not great or viable or that there is no demand or your product. The case however is that users may sometimes fail to be convinced by your landing.
On the other hand, convertible tools usually use a couple of things like triggers, sticky bars and scenario-based overlays. They use them to do the A/B test to know why, when and where your site’s visitors convert.
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Google Content Experiments
For beginners, this is the perfect choice for you. This is partially because it is free to run and also integrate directly with the Google Analytics. If it is a standard test, you need to create two different versions of the page. You then should know the period the test will run for and later set a percentage on your website traffic that you can experiment with. It is important to know that if you are working with multiple versions of a single page, then the platform allows you to only test up to 10 to optimise your website.
Once the A/B test has run for some time, you can then be in a position to see the version with the most and the least conversions. You can also see each page’s probability of getting more conversions than the original one.
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VWO- Visual Website Optimizer
Visual Website Optimizer is a great A/B testing tool as it allows the user to create variations of pages within their platform. You do not need any HTML Knowledge after you have pasted a smart code to the head of the website. They do this using a WYSIWYG interface. If you want to change the text, buttons, photos, colours or any other elements you simply have to drag and drop the style tools. Visual Website Optimizer will do the tests without necessarily altering the actual code on the website.
Additionally, it allows you to monitor the tests as many times as you would like to see the variations that are performing well.
Despite the fact that running tests using this tool does not necessarily require HTMl knowledge, you need the knowledge to implement the winning variation. Upon determining the winner, you will need to manually change the original page.
Conclusion
If you want to run A/B tests, there are a number of great effective tools available as discussed. They are all great options for you but ultimately your needs will determine what would work best for you.
For those who want to have the HTML ability to create web pages on their own and also do a simple tests, Google content Experiments is the best.
On the other hand, if you want to use an editor to save time then Optimizely is a perfect choice for you. Also, If you want landing page features and very advanced reporting tools, VWO or Unbounce will most definitely be ideal.
