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The Complete Guide To A/B Testing In Marketing

To A/B Testing in Marketing

By Adam WilsonPublished about a year ago 5 min read
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What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing in marketing, also known as split testing, is an invaluable tool for growth hacking.

It is an experiment where the subject is given choices and asked to choose. These variations, known as A and B, are presented to users at random.

A statistical analysis of the results will then determine which version, A or B, did best, according to some predetermined metrics, such as lead generation.

In other words, you can test which version received more clicks, generated more interest, and had a greater engagement.

Why Businesses Should Be Doing A/B Testing in Marketing

Whenever a business is faced with choices that require customer feedback, it has to resort to A/B testing.

For example, a manufacturer of potato chips wants to introduce a new flavor before the next NFL season. The marketing and innovation team has zeroed in on two options—Chili Lemon and Hot Garlic.

How to know which would be the better choice?

It’s simple, really if you use the right tool of marketing.

Find a group or cohort of possible future buyers and ask their opinion.

In this case, a college campus would be an excellent choice to carry out the randomized controlled experiment. Gather together a hundred students (Group A) and offer them Chili Lemon. Offer another hundred (Group B) Hot Garlic.

Which group is more impressed and desires to buy the product?

A/B testing tools take the guesswork out of choices and help entrepreneurs make informed choices.

Typical Use Cases of A/B Testing in Marketing

#Scenario 1

John owns a self-improvement blog. Lately one of his blog posts is getting 6,000 visits daily. It is a unique opportunity to get them to sign up for newsletters. He can later use the email database to offer courses.

However, he is unsure when the pop-up should be presented. He has two choices—present 30 seconds after they land on the blog page, or when they try to exit the site.

A split test can give him the answer in a day. Present random visitors with the A or B option. Find out which list has more sign-ups.

#Scenario 2

Nathan has a Wix Store that sells gym equipment. Wix gives him so many choices that he cannot decide on some parts of the UX design.

Should the menu bar be at the top or side? What size should CTA buttons be? Which CTA text is best?

For each of these, he should run an A/B test. It gets rid of any doubt since the test spells out what users want.

5 benefits of A/B testing

Improves profitability

A/B testing tools help businesses save costs. By quickly identifying outcomes that lead to greater profit, A/B testing improves the bottom line.

Increases engagement

A/B testing is an effective way to improve user engagement.

It gives website and app owners an insight into the users’ minds that helps them create interesting content and place them properly.

As a result, users find what they need and the site or app gets better engagement.

Improves ad campaigns

If you are running an ad on social media, it can often get very confusing.

Which type of ad on Facebook will draw in the maximum number of unique visitors? Video, single image, carousel, slideshow ads, or instant experiences?

A/B testing is the perfect way to find the answer.

Efficient conversion funnel

Landing page design, product page layout, and checkout flow are the three pillars of marketing conversion. There are several types of landing and product page design.

How to know which design would work best? Use A/B split testing relentlessly.

Split testing does not require an understanding of complex statistical models and forecasts. It is simple and remarkably effective. Either A or B will work better. What can be simpler than that? This is what makes it the most dependable tool of marketing.

Easy analysis

Split testing does not require an understanding of complex statistical models and forecasts. It is simple and remarkably effective. Either A or B will work better. What can be simpler than that? This is what makes it the most dependable tool of marketing.

How To Set Up A/B Testing?

Choose the variable

Decide what you want to test. The usual first choices are landing pages, product pages, and marketing emails.

If it is a landing page, you might want to try a couple of page designs that have different colors, fonts, and navigation. The test can be as broad or narrow as you want – two entirely different pages or two identical pages with slightly different fonts. The more identifiable the variable, the better for generating actionable information that leads to marketing conversion.

Decide splitting technique

With emails, this step is rather straightforward. Send the first variation to half of the group and the other to the other half.

But what about landing pages or CTA buttons?

You need to run two versions of the site simultaneously. This can be accomplished using PHP in the backend. Cookies determine which version of a site a user should be shown.

The most important task is to set up the experiment so that both groups have the same number of users (no more than ±0.5% difference).You can use tools from Webmaxy that accurately split the control and variation group.

Give it time

You need to run the A/B testing long enough to get accurate data.

How long is enough? That would depend on the number of visitors you have. Aim for at least 10% of monthly visitors.

The more the number of participants, the greater the validity of the outcome.

Caveat – websites that get very low engagement need to run it quite a long while. If you get only 50 visitors to your site daily, you probably have to run it for some time.

Perform it again

Do not depend on a single instance of A/B split testing alone. It paints only a part of the picture.

If you were testing the location of the CTA button, next test for colour and then for size.

One A/B testing alone can’t give you a lot of input. A series of them in quick succession produces a more granular model.

Wrapping Up….

Most marketing experts use a variety of tools for A/B testing in marketing. Webmaxy is a front runner that offers stupendous insights and breaks down the results into easily comprehensible reports. Impressive analytics and easy to use User Interface sets it apart from the competition.

If you own a website or an app it is highly advisable that you use A/B testing tools and watch user engagement grow with every passing month.

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About the Creator

Adam Wilson

Adam Wilson comes with an experience of 12+ years in the IT industry. As a Customer Success Manager, he has been researching and trying to understand the customers’ behavior in different scenarios.

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