Evaluate Your Traffic With A/B Testing
This time we are going to get familiar with powerful evaluation method for your website traffic,
And how to get the maximum from your visitors.
What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing or split testing is comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better.
You show two variations (A and B) of the web page to your visitors, and then select the one, which performs or converts the best.
Despite calling it A/B testing, the experiment can be done with as many pages as desired.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to a website who take action that goes beyond a casual content view or website visit.
Every website has a goal, this goal can be: signing up, buy a product, subscribe to service, click on Ads, etc…
Therefore every website wants his visitors to be converted to something other than ‘visitors’.
For example: if you have 1000 visitors on your website and 10 filled a sign up form, your conversion rate is 1% (10/1000).
Why you need A/B Test?
Simply because you want to get the maximum possible from your traffic.
With A/B test, you can find the best page variant with the highest Conversion rate.
What Can You Test?
With A/B Testing, you can test every element that is somehow connected or effects visitors.
Usually, these elements are tested:
• Header and Footer
• Layout and style
• Product description
• Text and content
• images
• Links
• Call to Action buttons (size,color,placement,shape )
• Forms
How to start
When starting a new campaign you should think and come with few ideas.then you create a variation landing page for each idea.
To start with, buy traffic to your website or get oragnic one.
The landing pages can be different or the same with some elements changing.
You than start driving traffic to these pages. usually equal amount of traffic to each page.
You will need to drive enough traffic to get reliable statistics and before you come to any conclusion.
By tracking this process, you can pick the best page with the highest Conversion rate that meets most to your goals.
Setting the test
You can setup the test in one of two ways:
Replace the element to be tested before the page loads
With this method, you create variations of the tested element.
What The A/B tool will do is replacing randomly the page original element with one of the variations before displaying that page to the visitor.
Redirect to another page
Create and different version of your web page, like two pages with different colors or buttons.
When the test runs, your A/B tool will redirect the visitors to different pages. usually visitors will be equally split between the web pages.
Steps to make A/B Test
1. Set your goals
For All A/B tests you should set goals for the conversion rate that you want to increase.
These goals can be simple: visits page, sign forms, clicks on Ads or ones that are more complex.
2. Create your Test pages
You need to make few pages with different changes or variations to them.
You can change content, visual look, colors, JavaScript codes, opt-in forms.
3. Select your A/B test tool
This can be from simple code snippet you put into your website or use a plug that does the work for you.
For a free basic tool you can use Google Website Optimizer.there are many plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla which you can use.
Another great option is Content Experiments that is part of Google Analytics. You set goals and Content Experiments lets you show several different variations of a page to users and to follow the conversion rate for each variation, of course totaly free.
4. Start tracking your A/B test
By using your tool you should be able to track and get reports for your test.
Most tools enable real time tracking and collect statistics on your pages.
5. Analyzing results
After you drive traffic and gather enough statistics, you will see which page is with the highest Conversion rate.
The winner page is than selected and you can make other small adjustments and run the A/B tests again to find the best variant of the winner.
In summary, A/B test is a great way to find how well your traffic is used.
Whether organic or buying traffic you want to know you exploit the most from your site traffic.
Hi,
indeed very informative blog.
Applying A-B test onto whole site or site pages will make it more approachable for newbies to transform them into more than just a “visitor”. Your blog is definitely gonna provide guidelines to seekers looking for pure organic web traffic for free rather than to buy it.
Thanks for sharing.