A/B testing, also called split testing, is a critical component of any digital marketing strategy. However, few business owners understand how A/B testing can really be used, what data can be gleaned from it, and how to implement changes recommended by the results. It’s important that entrepreneurs know what split testing can do for sales and how to navigate the basics.

A/B testing can help you:

Test Every Aspect of Your Website

Many people make the mistake of believing that you can only split test certain parts of a webpage, such as the headlines and images. However, you can test just about any aspect of your site, down to font choices, colours, and button placement. Even the smallest thing, like a yellow button instead of a green one, can have a significant impact on the way consumers feel about a brand or a product, which can either boost or lower conversion rates.

 If you have pages on your site that are performing poorly or have low conversion rates, break it down and test every feature until you find what best influences your target audience to convert.

Reduce Your Bounce Rates

The bounce rate of each page is a value that lets you know how many users are coming to a page and immediately clicking off. High bounce rates can indicate to search engines that your page doesn’t offer value to users, impacting its ability to rank well. Not to mention that if your users are bouncing instead of buying, this impacts your bottom line. Bounce rates directly correlate with your sales, so it’s important to pay attention to this number and to lower it as much as possible.

Use A/B testing to test a wide variety of different options, including long-form and short-form content, more or fewer images, and other factors that may be causing users to bounce. By identifying these issues and making changes to your website’s design or content accordingly, you can reduce your bounce rates significantly.

Improve Visitor Engagement with Your Content

You can also use split testing to make sure your content is on point with what your target audience wants to read. A/B testing can tell you:

• If your content is too long or too short
• If your content is easy enough for users to read
• Which headlines are the most effective
• How users respond to your featured images
• If your opt-in forms are too long or confusing for users, or if they’re in the right place
• How effective your calls to action are

Since “content is king” on the web, it’s important to ensure yours is top quality. Your content not only serves to educate readers but also to facilitate trust-building between consumers and your brand. By using A/B testing, you can determine what type of content your target audience responds best to, so you can laser-focus your content marketing efforts exactly where they need to go.

Analyse Critical Metrics with Ease

Split testing is one of the easiest ways to evaluate crucial metrics for your site, since there’s generally a clear “winner” among the two (or sometimes three) options you’re pitting against each other. You’ll be able to rely on cold, hard data like bounce rates, time spent on page, and other metrics to determine what changes to make to your site. Other options for analytics are often more challenging to understand and may not give as clear indicators of what your next action step should be.

Increase Your Conversion Rates

Naturally, the goal of your website is to get users to become customers, or in other words, convert from a browser to a buyer. The higher your conversion rates, the better job your website is doing at empathising with users, offering solutions to their problems, and encouraging them to take immediate action — all three of which are necessary for a user to make a decision to either purchase, fill out a form, or make a phone call to your business. Split testing allows you to weed out website issues that could be impacting your conversion rates, like forms that are too long or in an obscure place, or a lack of engaging content.

Increase Conversion Value

Beyond improving the overall number of conversions you get, you can also use A/B testing to increase the value of each conversion. Once you’ve nailed the appearance, functionality, and content that your target audience desires, you can apply those strategies to pages with higher value. This strategy helps to further convert consumers not only to buy, but to buy the higher-priced item.

For example, say your business sells vacuum cleaners. Your lowest-priced model is your most popular, but you’re getting far less leads online than you ought to be considering the demand for the product. Your split test tells you that your content is too short, your form is too long, and your users like blue buttons instead of red ones. After making these changes to the purchase page for your lowest-priced model, you notice that your sales are going up. Now, you can apply those same tactics to other pages on your site with higher-value vacuum cleaners. Ideally, you should also see an appropriate increase in the conversion rate on pages offering costlier products.

A/B Testing is Great, but Now What? How to Get Started

The evidence is clear that split testing is essential for business owners who want to continually improve their digital marketing strategy and content offerings to consumers. But how exactly do you get started? Learning the ins and outs of A/B testing and how to use it to the fullest potential isn’t often feasible for entrepreneurs who are focused on growing their business. This is especially true considering that split testing really requires testing one factor at a time, or you won’t know which change you made elicited the result you wanted. That’s where we come in.

At Agile Marketing, we have the experience, skills, and cutting-edge technology needed to help you analyse your website and deliver more value to potential customers. We know how valuable A/B testing can be and how to use it to optimise your website for targeted conversions. We can help reduce your risk of spending time and money making changes to your website that either won’t be effective, or worse, will cause your bounce rates to skyrocket and your conversion rates to tank. Whether you’re looking to boost your sales or increase free download inquiries, or anything in between, we can help. Contact us today to learn more about split testing and digital marketing, or to discuss marketing solutions for your business.