All you need to know about A/B testing

Imagine this. You have an excellent product. You know that the future is digital and have started your digital journey. You have a cute social media page, post regularly, and direct interested people to your website through your “link in bio”. You think your website is just irresistible, and it does get traffic. But not at the explosive level, you want it to be. You wonder what is wrong. Well, nothing is, but often what you think is great is not what your visitors experience as great too.

One place to start with addressing this is A/B testing. The test results are twofold – one, it helps you understand what your customer or site visitor wants. And two, it can enhance your customer experience levels, with improved Ui/UX.

What is A/B testing?

In simple terms, A/B testing is a data-driven approach to understanding what clicks with the visitors of your site. It gives you great insights into what drives your visitors towards becoming customers, says a leading Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad.

Since it is a data-driven approach, you got it – the use cases are far many in digital marketing.

How does A/B marketing work?

A/B testing is a simple strategy. You build an experiment where you create two variants – of the product or the service or the website. Now you direct the website traffic to these two variants such that each variant gets 50% of the traffic. Next, you monitor, observe and record how traffic behaves on both variants. You now have a comparative analysis of consumer behaviour to determine what works best.

The variant with the most positive heuristic result is chosen in the next phase, where 100% of the traffic is directed to it. If the results are promising, this is the chosen one. This testing is simple and helps digital marketers understand user preferences so that they can work on segmentation and targeting better.

For instance, you could use a particular template to get more views on Instagram or modify your landing page to get more clicks.

When should you use A/B testing?

The aim of A/B testing is to improve user engagement and enhance the experience. So A/B testing can be used in numerous cases like

Visitor pain point identification:

Let us go back to our imagined scenario. In this, we now understand that something is falling short of our journey from click to convert, but we cannot place our finger on what that is. In such a case, you can map a customer journey, and build test cases to identify where visitors are struggling on your page.

Maybe you are a retailer and you have a high abandoned cart rate. You have identified the problem. You believe that this is because the checkout process is cumbersome. Build test case A with the existing process, and test case B with a shorter process.

You suspect (the hypothesis of your A/B test) that users might be struggling with how long the checkout process is. So alongside your original checkout process, you create a shorter version (Variation B). When you run an A/B test, and the results confirm your hunch, voila, you choose the shorter checkout option.

Increased audience engagement, driven ROI and reduced bounce rates

A/B testing also works brilliantly well when you want to test if your content is apt and engaging. We all know that content is king, and when you have engaging content, you will know that users won’t bounce off your site and engage better and this would mean an uptick in most of your website metrics.

Also, if you are running a targeted marketing campaign, chances are you may want to test it out for maximum impact. Do A/B testing with new product launches or templates and see what runs better. You can check if a specific e-mail campaign runs, google advertisements or even in-house physical events, says a leading SEO Company in Hyderabad.

Improved UI/UX:

The biggest area where A/B testing shows results is a product development and design. The dev cycle involves updating elements of the design continuously, and variations of the same design. A/B testing helps in giving the best version of it. If you have set goals, it is easy to test hypotheses using A/B testing to provide an enhanced UI/UX experience.

Running an A/B test can help you build effective, engaging content, and also have positive effects on the digital metrics of your application. You will be surprised at how much a small change like changing the colour or placement of a button can impact audience engagement. This improved experience over time will fetch many highly rewarding results like speed to market with great conversion rates and increased return on investments. A/B testing is simple, effective and fast. It can be a great tool in your arsenal!