Did you know that the first product sold online was a Sting CD? That was back in 1994, by an eCommerce site called NetMarket, run out of New Hampshire.
Another fun fact: Amazon didn’t send out their first book order until 1995.
Clearly, NetMarket was a pioneer in web commerce. And P.S: The company still exists!
In the 90s and early 2000s, business websites, particularly those for small businesses, were merely another means of advertising.
They could list their products and services, their location, and their contact information. Maybe they had an email webform for potential customers to reach out. But the goal was to drive visits to their brick and mortar stores.
Sure, they were using their websites to build awareness, but that was really about it.
Today, billions of transactions and conversions happen online every day.
Business websites have evolved from merely informational to end-to-end eCommerce engines. They act as a storefront, inventory, and checkout all in one, especially if they’re a business with no brick-and-mortar location to begin with.
And if you’re creating a website for your clients (or even for yourself), they are a major part of your business model. These sites are what pulls people in and guides them through the marketing funnel.
You know that accelerating the journey from “just browsing” to “new customer” is essential to the bottom line of your clients’ businesses - but how can you achieve impactful results quickly on a website?
A/B testing is a low-risk, high-reward growth strategy for helping you find quick wins that boost revenue and improve the experience customers have with your clients’ brand.
Unfortunately, a lot of people get overwhelmed by the time commitment, or the amount of A/B testing tools that are available on the market. And some just don’t know where to start.
But there are some really lightweight options out there that require minimal commitment to see results, and that scale with you as you and your clients grow (more on that later). As for not knowing where to start - this post has you covered!
What elements should you be testing on your website
Before we dive into A/B testing techniques, it’s important to provide context on what you should be testing and why you’re doing it in the first place.
Whether your aim is increased sales, email signups, or pageviews, your A/B testing goals all fall under one larger concept: conversion rate optimization (CRO).
All of those visitors you convince to buy, sign up, or download are doing the same thing: They’re converting. Your goal with an A/B test is to get them to convert more often.
“CRO” may sound like an intimidating term, but increasing your conversion rate is simply a matter of:
Paying attention to the experience visitors are having on-site (through numerical data from Google Analytics or visualized data from a tool like Crazy Egg).
Making changes that you think will improve their path to hitting your client’s stated business goals.
Monitoring the results of those changes (both steps 2 and 3 can be accomplished via an A/B testing tool).
If you’re new to the concept of CRO, this video will give you some background and inspiration for getting started.
To run a successful A/B test, you can’t skip Step One. You need a question, an answer based on real customer behavior, and a hypothesis.
Here are some examples of questions you might have about the website in question:
Are the CTAs (Calls-to-Action) placed above the fold?
Are the products placed in order of their popularity with customers?
Are people clicking on elements (like a “free quote” or “free shipping” banner) that aren’t linked to anything?
Are people actually using the hamburger menu? How about the search bar?
Is there a disconnect between ad campaigns and landing pages?
Are website visitors overwhelmed by too many primary and secondary CTAs?
Has a new chat widget covered up a key CTA offer?
Are people turned off by the email capture popups?
Are shoppers ignoring certain collections or categories?
Next, you’ll want to observe how people are interacting with the website to come up with an answer to these questions. There are several tools that are easy to interpret that can point you in the right direction:
Heatmap:
A heatmap will show you which elements on the site are the most popular with visitors.
Questions this report answers:
“Are the products placed in order of their popularity with customers?”
Scrollmap:
A scrollmap will show you how far down the page visitors get, on average, and where they stop paying attention to the content.
Questions this report answers:
“Are the CTAs placed above the fold?”
“Are shoppers ignoring certain collections or categories?”
Overlay:
An overlay report will show you how many clicks each website element is getting, as well as a percentage breakdown so you know which elements are driving the most engagement overall.
Questions this report answers:
“Are people clicking on elements (like a “free quote” or “free shipping” banner) that aren’t linked to anything?”
“Are people actually using the hamburger menu? How about the search bar?”
Confetti:
A confetti report will show you click behavior based on demographics like referral source, new vs. returning visitor, search term, or device type.
Questions this report answers:
“Is there a disconnect between ad campaigns and landing pages?”
Recordings:
And finally, session recordings will let you watch individual visitors navigate from page to page on your site so you can pinpoint friction points along the customer journey.
Questions this tool answers:
“Are website visitors overwhelmed by too many primary and secondary CTAs?”
“Has a new chat widget covered up a key CTA offer?”
“Are people turned off by the email capture popups?”
Now that you’ve got a framework for thinking about what changes you would make to thesite, and a way to find out where people are getting stuck, how do you conduct a proper A/B test?
Let’s dive in and take a closer look at this essential step to growing your clients’ businesses online.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing (also called split testing) may sound complicated as a concept, but essentially it’s a mechanism for increasing conversions by changing something on the website.
It’s important to keep in mind that “conversions” can mean different things to different companies, depending on their business goals. Here are some examples of what a metric of success might be for your A/B test:
Sell more products
Get more registrations
Get more pageviews
Once you’ve picked your goal, you’ll make a change to a page on the site (this is called the “variable”) and test whether it helps you reach your business goal faster than the original version of that page (called the “control”).
If the variable wins, your hypothesis was right, and you should come up with a new hypothesis to test to see if you can get an even better conversion rate.
If the control wins, you should come up with a new hypothesis to test.
Why is A/B testing important
No matter the outcome, you should constantly be testing new design updates!
Here’s an example of why.
Ecommerce brand WallMonkeys wanted to make their homepage more engaging and improve the shopper experience.
First, they replaced the hero image with one they thought might be more fun and attractive to visitors.
Here’s the old image, with the palm trees on the wall.
And here’s the updated image, with spotted cats.
They tested the new homepage against the old one and saw a modest uptick in conversions.
But they noticed when they ran a heatmap on the control that visitors weren’t very focused on the center of the page where their “Shop Now” CTA was placed.
So, as a followup to their first A/B test, they decided to move their search field down from the top to that center position.
Once again, they tested the old version with the search field at the top against the new version with the search field in the center.
And that’s what got them a 550% increase in purchase conversions.
The right way to A/B test
Before we talk about launching your first experiments, let me make it clear that there’s a right way and wrong way to start A/B testing. Follow these guidelines to ensure your tests have internal buy-in, impact, and significant results.
01. Set and communicate your goals
We know your overall goal: To help your clients grow their businesses online. But let’s get more granular. How are you going to do that?
Do they want to see an increase in eBook downloads? Maybe they have a particular product page that’s not seeing as many sales as you would like?
Whatever it is, work with your client to write it down in very specific language and put a number on it.
I want to increase eBook downloads by 40 percent.
I want to increase sales of this product through the website by 30 percent.
Communicate that goal to all stakeholders and make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Once you have a clearly-framed goal that everyone can agree upon, putting together a plan and implementing it will be that much easier.
02. Prioritize your tests
Okay, you know what you want to do. Now, in what order are you going to get it done?
After you’ve looked at your heatmaps and recordings to see if people are finding theCTAs, search fields, or checkout buttons, you’ve got to pick which page to perform your tests on.
We recommend taking a look at Google Analytics. Either start with a page that gets a lot of traffic, like the homepage or a popular product page. That’s because you’ll gather a lot of data quickly on whether your change was effective. Or begin with a page that has a high bounce rate, as it has the most room for improvement.
03. Test one thing at a time
This one is pretty important. Each and every test should be done on its own. If you test both the CTA color and copy at the same time and you see an increase in conversions, it will be nearly impossible to determine which change had the greatest effect on that increase.
How to use A/B testing to help your clients meet their business goals
Here are some examples to help you understand how to use A/B testing for registrations and subscriptions, on-page analytics, and sales.
A/B testing to increase registrations and subscriptions:
There are a couple ways to improve a website to increase these kinds of conversions.
If people aren’t signing up for your client’s newsletter, subscribing to their podcast, or downloading their eBook, there are many reasons why these browsers may not be converting:
Incorrect placement of your CTA
Distracting elements like chat boxes or pop up forms
Competing CTAs that split the clicks
This is where the reports I mentioned earlier come in handy. When you take a look at the aggregated behavior of website visitors, you’ll be able to pinpoint where the roadblocks are.
If you have your subscription CTAs placed on the right rail, for instance, and you notice that the right rail isn’t a popular hotspot on the heat map, or garnering clicks in the overlay report, that is a cue to A/B test the placement of your CTA (Hint: In-text, toward the top of the page is likely to get more attention).
Similarly, individual session recordings can help you troubleshoot any issues with webform completions. If you observe that people are partially filling out a form and then bailing, that’s a signal to A/B test the following variants:
Reduced number of fields
Shortened copy
Simplified messaging
Webforms should be simple, requiring as little information from the audience as possible. The focus should be on the text fields and the CTA, and not much more.
Check out this example from Vimeo.
There are three fields to fill out and two CTAs. You can either join with email or use lazy signup through Google+.
That’s it.
A/B testing to increase on-page analytics:
If your client sells advertising space on their site, their business model depends not only on how many people come to their site, but also on how many pages these visitors view, how far they scroll down the page, and how long they spend on your pages.
These kinds of metrics are especially important for media sites, who have to determine not only where to place content, but how long it should run and what kinds of content it should include.
Radio Free Europe, for example, used Crazy Egg’s heatmap and A/B testing tools on their homepage design, site navigation, and article layout to increase click-throughs to content and increase time on page.
They constantly test article placement, article length, and other variables and report findings back to their editorial team. The editors then plan layout and design changes based on those findings.
A/B testing to increase product sales:
Odds are if you’re working for an eCommerce brand, you’ll be spending a lot of time and money on paid ads, content marketing and social media, trying to get people to their product pages.
But if their product page isn’t optimized, all that effort is going to waste.
Here are a few A/B tests you can run to increase product purchases on the brand’s site, based on observations you have already made about its website visitors. (Remember: If you skip that first step, you’re going into an A/B test with zero context):
01. If you look at a scrollmap report and see that the CTA doesn’t fall where the majority of people are engaged, you have a problem.
As an A/B test, I would definitely bump this “View All Products” button up the page, since only 37% of page visitors are seeing it right now.
02. You can use a list report to show you whether you may need to rethink the on-site email acquisition strategy. Sometimes, email collection popup forms that automatically appear when someone visits a product page end up stopping people from making a purchase. In this case, the X on the email form is getting 31% of clicks on the page, while the “Shop” CTA is getting 8.2%. Ouch. It may be time to consider A/B testing an exit intent pop up instead.
03. Session recordings are great for giving you clues about which elements you should be A/B testing on the page.
For example:
If you see people are having a hard time finding the product they’re looking for, you could A/B test the placement of the search bar.
If you see people are rage clicking on an element that isn’t interactive, you can A/B test linking it to something.
If you see people are abandoning checkout forms midway through, you can A/B test the length or copy.
Conversion rate optimization will help you offer solutions to your clients who are looking to grow their businesses. A/B testing is one powerful strategy you can use to reach that goal quickly!
Just make sure that:
Your process is strategic and methodical.
You analyze the behavior of website visitors.
You pick a goal.
You make a change.
You don’t forget to keep testing new variants!
Whether you hit upon a winning variant or not, keep A/B testing! Small improvements over time will really add up in helping you get as many conversions as you can.
By Laurie Mega, Crazy Egg
Efficient and experienced content creator, and editor for B2B and B2C brands.
