A complete guide to A/B testing

We live in an era of data-driven marketing and modern-day businesses make decisions on a scientific approach and relies on data. We want the best for our business websites and sometimes, that involves the trial and testing method to understand what works in our favor. At times, the design of the page is good, the layout looks good, the colors and themes are all great, but even all of this is not able to give your business the desired results. All your hours of research and analysis do not yield the results as per your plan, then perhaps a proper check is on the list. If you notice that the ads are not performing well, and do not accomplish the results as per your standards, it is time to change your strategy and not the ultimate goal. This is what every successful business works on; they keep updating their strategies that best suit their campaign to achieve the desired results. The campaigns aim to increase traffic on their website, and always wish to get the visitors converted into customers using the landing page, generate leads, and increase the conversion rate. This is done by studying the analytics of the customer’s behavior. A/B testing of the website and the campaigns helps to understand which version has the higher traffic and good conversion rate. In this article, we will discuss how A/B testing in marketing helps any campaign to have a major impact on their online business.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing (also known as spilt test or bucket test) is a process of comparing two versions of something to gauge which works out better. Let’s take an example to see how it works for PPC ads – it tests the same ad or landing page against each other to determine which one performs better. A/B testing is an experiment in which two variants of the same page or product are shown to the users at random, and statistical analysis is performed to determine which variation performs better to get the desired conversion goal. A/B testing in marketing can be used to test any element of the Google ads like website copy, search ads, product description landing page, display ad, marketing email, remarketing ads, social post, and much more.

With the advent of digital marketing, businesses conduct split testing to figure out which marketing strategies work best for them and enable them to get more specific, reliable, and faster results to increase their conversion rate. A/B testing lets a campaign try out things to improve the content, provide the best customer experiences, and accomplish their goals. In the digital marketing world, the split test is done using many technical resources and it helps businesses update their strategies in real-time and on a much larger scale than the traditional methods of advertising on television or using letters, to better the marketing process. With A/B testing you can always check more than one factor and know what works better. For example – you can evaluate the font of the page, analyze the content organization, check the landing page theme, adjust the page layout, design of the page, etc.

Two main uses of A/B testing

Many digital marketers believe that Google Ads A/B testing is just an optimization tool, which in particular involves PPC ads and landing pages. Contrary to this belief, A/B testing in marketing can not only be used for optimization but also for validation which is important for any PPC campaign. If any PPC campaign works on the required changes that they get to know from the split testing results, they can see the changes in the ranking of their website and also in the increased clicks on their Google ads. When there is an upgrade in the website, it can improve the conversion rate both for the paid traffic and organic traffic. If you find it difficult to work on the Google Ads A/B testing process, then you can outsource PPC services to white label PPC Company.

• Using A/B testing for optimization – Google Ads A/B testing is primarily used for the optimization of an ongoing PPC campaign, particularly testing which specific variation in page needs to be more focused on like the headlines, images, layout, form, call-to-action, and other factors that will affect the conversion rate. This method is known to increase the conversion rates of a PPC campaign after it has already rolled out for a significant length of time.
• Using A/B testing for validation – As discussed, Google Ads A/B testing is good for optimizing an already ongoing PPC campaign, however, it can also be used to validate which particular variation the best for your business before you work on the changes. This validation gives you an idea to work on the main changes in particular and focus on the prime variations that could be the deciding factors to generate the best results and help to grow your campaign.

Availing white label PPC services could come in useful, as the you may find it hard to do organized testing and figure out the best for their website. With outsourcing PPC services you stand ahead of your competitors and get things done in less time and in an organized way.

Why you should do A/B testing

Split testing gives you the data that you need to make the most of your marketing budget. Let’s say you have a set amount of budget and you want to drive traffic using Google Ads. You do a split test and prepare a record of the number of clicks you get for 3 different variations of the product. You do this spilt test for a month, preparing the records on a daily basis and at a particular time. The results from the test will help you determine which variation has the most click-through-rate (CTR). This data can be used to shape your campaign accordingly, improving its return on investment (ROI), more than if just a random one was chosen. Let us see some of the benefits of A/B testing.

• Get better ROI from existing traffic – Businesses have realized that getting quality traffic can incur a huge cost. A/B testing helps campaigns to make the most of the existing traffic and helps increase conversion rate without having to spend much on acquiring new traffic. This testing can give high ROI sometimes as even the most minor changes can result in a significant increase in conversions.
• Achieve statistically significant improvements – This testing is completely data-driven with no room for guesswork, feelings, sentiments, instincts, etc. As actions speak louder than words, similarly with these data, businesses can easily determine what works better for their PPC campaign and make significant changes the next time they present their website to the customers.

Metrics for A/B testing

Whether you perform the spilt test on your own or outsource PPC services to a white label PPC Company, there needs to be monitoring on what are the key positions of the analytics that the focus needs to be given. Although you will get the idea of what to focus more on and what necessary steps to take to improve your conversion rate, but there are certain variants that need to be prioritized more as the visitors spend more time on those particular components.

Here some of the important metrics are discussed that will tell you if your adjustments to factors that affect the leads to get converted to customers are making any positive progress or not. Monitoring, measuring, and adjusting these metrics based on the Google Ads A/B testing results will improve your ad campaign to optimize better results.

1. Bounce rates – Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking any intended action. The visitors just land on the webpage and do not take any action that would be meaningful to you; such as making a click, filling out a form, or making a purchase. Even if any PPC Campaign is attracting a huge amount of traffic but the conversions from this traffic is below par, your PPC performance will still not be optimum as you would want it to be. So every business should try to reduce its bounce rate.

Bounce rate is important for three main reasons:

• • Increase conversion rate – Someone that bounces from your website obviously didn’t convert. A/B testing can help you determine factors like why the visitors are bouncing off your website. So when you do proper research as to what could be the possible reasons for bouncing, you can increase your conversion rate.
  • Google ranking factor –Bounce rate may be used as a Google Ranking Factor. If there are visitors that keep leaving your webpage you may get a low rank in the search engines. So the campaigns should make strategies to reduce the bounce rate, and employ robust digital marketing strategies to rank websites better on SERPs. CTR is an important factor to determine the Google ads quality score, as Google lays emphasis on CTR to rank websites. Every business that runs PPC ads on Google wishes to appear on the top ranking positions whenever a search query is made for the product or services that they provide. The campaigns should consider working on some of the points to rank better like site link addition, negative keyword addition, using ad extension, reviewing competitors’ ads, use of call extensions, doing keyword research, adding unique offers in the headline, and many more.
  • Improving content – There must be some issues with the landing page description, that the users leave the website without making any click. The campaigns should take efforts to improve their content, better user experience on the landing page, use proper call-to-action buttons, and make an organized page layout to keep the visitor interested in buying the product.

2. Improve visitor –When there is a high bounce rate seen by any website, this means that their content marketing strategy needs a serious redesigning. This may seem to be a simple thing but is the most important part of digital marketing strategy as your website can thrive on the success of your content strategy. It is the visitors only that are finally going to convert into customers. This strategy tells you how effective is your campaign to acquire more clients. The best thing here is that the clients act as part time content marketer. The customers that leave the website are telling the campaigns that they do not fulfill the demands of the customer and that is why they end up leaving the website. The campaigns can make the best use of this, and then plan out content marketing strategies to increase their new customer possibilities.
3. Time spent on page –Traffic volume is an important metric, but how much time people spend on your pages per visit will give you an insight into how targeted audiences are accepting and consuming your content. With A/B testing in marketing, you can figure out the average time spent by visitors who finally go ahead and convert into customers. The visitors who feel interested will scroll through various sections of the website and with the help of the Google analytics tool, you can figure out the choices that what the audience searched for the most in the various sections and sub-sections of the website.
4. Conversion rate – Of course measuring every completed conversion per unique visit would be the ultimate metric you’ll need to test and monitor with your A/B Split testing. The conversion rate depends on the presentation of your landing page, call to action, etc. to finally buy the product. The lead generation steps like the call to action buttons, feedback from the customers, whether the customers take discount offers seriously, whether they do peer to peer marketing help plenty in understanding what the audience wants. The suggestions from the customers are also very important as they are the only ones for whom all the marketing efforts are taken. The high conversion rate is suggestive that the customers are happy with what you are offering and thus, is indicative of a successful marketing strategy.

What can you A/B test?

The fate of the business is decided by the conversion funnel of your website. So every piece of content that reaches the users should be optimized to its maximum potential. While undertaking an optimization program, the following key elements should be A/B tested:

1. Headlines and sub-headlines – The first thing that the visitor sees is the headlines and this is what the forms their first impression about the business. This is what decides whether the visitor will leave or go further down the conversion funnel. Hence, it becomes very important to be extra cautious while writing headlines and sub-headlines and present the described content in a concise manner. This needs to be tested to get the user’s attention and ensure that it talks clearly about your products, services, and benefits.
2. Body – The body of your website should clearly state what is in store for the visitor. It should also resonate with your page headlines. A well-written body enhances your chances of increasing the visitors to finally convert into customers. When testing the content of your page, try focusing on the writing style and formatting style, so that even if your page is descriptive the user is interested to read it. Although try to break the content into paragraphs, bullet points, and keep the language simple and easy.
3. Design & layout – For a campaign to perform well, it is important that works well in harmony. At times, you may miss placing some essential elements on the website thinking it is not of much importance, but in practice it may actually work in their favor. With A/B testing, you can figure out whether a certain element was worth leaving out or not. In the present technological world, customers want to see everything about the product before they end up buying it. Therefore your product page must be optimized in designs and layout. Try to provide clear information, write simple content, create a sense of urgency, etc.

4. Navigation – To deliver an excellent user experience, navigation bar is an essential element to test. Ensure that important sections of the website are linked properly in the navigation bar so that the user finds it easy to navigate from the home page to other pages and finally to the final purchase page. Make two plans A and B for a product or service and place the navigation bar at different positions to figure out which one gives more results.

5. Forms – Forms are mediums through which customers get in touch with you. Every customer has different opinions and demands from the business. So figure out what are the changes to be done to be more presentable to the wide range of audiences so that they increase the lead generation.

6. Call-to-action – The CTA is where all the real action takes place, whether the user fills up the form, makes any click, or ends up leaving the website. Try to figure this out by making A/B copies, placement, colors, sizes, etc., and then decide which one works better.

7. Social proof – Highlighting customer reviews is the best part for any business as this builds the trust of the customers on the campaigns. Recommendations and reviews can also be taken from the experts of the particular fields or can come in the form of awards and badges, media mentions, certificates, testimonials, etc. Try to test which social proof to display, the type of layouts, and the placement on your website.

How to perform A/B test

Doing A/B testing in marketing offers a very systematic way of finding what works and what does not for any given marketing campaign. The marketing campaigns are geared towards driving more traffic and sales and the campaigns need to keep in mind that they offer the best experience to the visitors coming to their website. A white label PPC campaign knows the best marketing efforts and organizes structured testing by pinpointing the most crucial problem areas that need optimization. Some of the steps involved in the testing are discussed below:

STEP 1: Research

Firstly, research needs to be done to understand how the website is currently performing. This includes collecting data on how many users are coming to the site, which page drives the most traffic, what are the conversion rate of pages, etc. The A/B testing tools can be used to figure out which pages audience spend the most time on, high bounce rate, shortlisting the pages with the highest revenue potential, or the section of the page that drives high traffic. Qualitative analysis from the recording tools can be collected to study the behavior of the user and to figure out if there is any gap in the user’s journey, or do they move step by step and ultimately end up buying the product.

STEP 2: Observe and formulate hypothesis

You do not want your test campaign to be a directionless compass, so try getting closer to your business goals by logging research observations and creating a data-backed hypothesis aimed at increasing conversations. The qualitative and quantitative research tool gives you an idea about what are the steps to be taken to get the new visitors to convert into customers and increase the trust of the existing ones. It is now your responsibility to analyze and make sense of that data. The best way to analyze the data is to utilize every bit of information and then draw user insights to formulate a data-backed hypothesis. Once the hypothesis is ready test it on various parameters like how much confidence you have in its macro goals, how easy is the setup, how user-friendly is it in working, etc.

STEP 3: Create variations

Things keep changing in the global world at a very rapid speed, so businesses must keep updating their product pages and services to be in line with their competitors and present the best to their customers. The businesses should create variations on their website based on the hypothesis and A/B testing in marketing against the older (existing) version. You can test multiple variations against the present one to see which one works best. Variations may include users not filling up forms, or your form has an extra number of columns or rows, try to not ask for personal information, try to redesign the theme of the landing page, etc.

STEP 4: Run test

Testing is an important part as this only tells the business campaign where they are lacking to meet their desired results. Here let’s see the different types of testing:

1. Split URL testing– It is different from A/B testing in marketing. Split URL testing is testing multiple versions of your webpage on different URLs. Your website traffic is split between control and variations, and respective conversion rates are measured to decide the best version. The fundamental contrast with A/B testing is that the main variations are hosted on the URL of split URL testing. It is important when significant changes are necessary and the design of the website needs not to be touched.
2. Multivariate testing – Multivariate testing is the method in which changes are made to the multiple sections of a webpage and variations are created for all the possible combinations. This element helps to figure out the element on a webpage that makes the most impact on the conversion rate. It is a more complicated method, so you can outsource PPC services to get the desired result for your business.
3. Multipage testing –Multipage testing is a form of experimentation where you can test changes to particular elements across multiple pages. There are two ways of doing multipage testing. One, you can take all pages of the sales funnel and create new pages for them, and then you test it against the control. This is called funnel multipage testing. And two, you can check how the addition or removal, of the recurring elements like security badges, testimonials, and others can impact conversions across all funnel. This is called Classic or Conventional multipage testing.

STEP 5: Result analysis

Even though this is the last step in finding the best of the A or B version of the test, analysis of the result is extremely important. Because A/B testing gathers continuous data and gives performance analysis of the campaigns, it is in this step that your entire testing journey unravels. After all the testing is performed, analyze the results by considering metrics like conversion rate, bounce rate, visitor engagement, increase in traffic percentage, etc. If you find the results as per your desired level of satisfaction then it’s well and good, and if not draw insights from it and implement it in the subsequent tests.

Wrap up

After going through this comprehensive piece on A/B testing, you would now be fully equipped on how to plan your roadmap to optimization of your Google ads and website. Follow each step diligently, and give importance to the data portion to increase your website’s conversion rates. If done with complete dedication and knowledge, A/B testing would reduce the bounce rate and optimize the Google ads and push audience to take the intended action.

References

• A/B Testing: Definition, How it Works, Examples & Tools
• How to Do A/B Testing: A Checklist You’ll Want to Bookmark