In today’s increasingly expansive business world, decisions now take seconds, and seconds have never been more valuable—which means the time it takes to thoughtfully produce compelling content and marketing materials for your organization are all the more important. With the speed of business continuing to rise, it’s easy to take shortcuts when it comes to the creation of your content and promotions. You need a bright idea to improve your process.
But what are your options? You need an effective way to garner the most value out of your marketing materials. You need AB Testing. And you need it pronto.
What is AB Testing?
So what does AB Testing refer to? It’s the process of measuring the effectiveness of created page content. Basically, it’s a way for marketers to test the effectiveness of the content in order to significantly improve conversion rates by taking two separate versions of the same promotion or content and testing what users engage with more frequently.
How Does It Work?
So how does AB Testing really work?
The process starts with some labeling. Take your first or original page and start there. They call that the “Control (A)” portion of the AB Test. From here you want to figure out what your parameters are for a successful campaign so that you have a clear outline of your goals to create an alternate version of the content, labeled “Variant (B).” The point of the variant is to decide which content gets more conversions. Maybe there was a different image in the variant, or the colors have been swapped out—but things as simple as color choice can greatly affect your outcome.
When a visitor arrives to your page, they’ll stumble upon one of the two versions. At the end of the testing period, you’ll have clear results in order to determine which page faired better in the marketplace.
What are the Benefits?
- The first major benefit to AB Testing is that in gauges the behavior of your real-world audience. There is no guesswork other than what you’re viewers will engage with most. Because your pool of testers are actual people who are acting out their own interests and desires, your results have more significance.
- The second benefit is how accurate AB Testing is at measuring the statistical difference between design/content variations and conversion rates. And since AB Testing involves large testing environments, you can be sure the pool is well diversified.
- The third benefit? AB Testing is a significantly valuable tool that can be implemented on the cheap. And assuming you’re variant design is an uplifted version of your control content, the added work isn’t disadvantageous.
Drawbacks?
For AB Testing, the major drawbacks revolve around the strict structure of implementation. For example, you may want to create tons of different designs around a single topic and test them all—but you need to gauge them in small instances because you run the risk of diluting your content. It’s best to test your ideas one a time. It’s also worth noting that all the statistics your pull in are only valuable in that instance, as future variables are project-dependent.
Things You Should Be AB Testing?
CTAs: You should be looking at design, copy, color, and page placement, as CTA’s are generally smaller, taking up less page real estate. The difference in a single word can mean the difference between a 10% conversion rate, and 90%.
Email: Email conversions are timely, so the time at which you send them out can mean all the difference, alone. What days are your targets most engaged? Which subject lines work best? Who should it be from?
Content: For landing pages, thank you pages, or any other content-heavy materials, you should be testing the clarity of what your saying, as well as the design. If it’s not easy to see why you’re there and what the site offers, the page isn’t doing its job.