If you haven’t made any updates to your website for a while and are starting to see your traffic, conversions, or engagement plateau, you may want to consider opening your mind to the world of A/B testing. A/B testing is a great way to see how small changes to your website can make an impact on your bottom line. However, this process can be tedious and frustrating if you don’t have the right frame of mind or procedures for conducting your test. So to make this process easier and more effective, here are three tips for A/B testing pages on your website.
Push Aside Your Assumptions
Before you even begin testing anything on your pages, you need to come at the problems and data the correct way. According to George Matthew, a contributor to CrazyEgg.com, to have the most success with your A/B tests, you must push aside all of your assumptions about what you think the results will show. If you have bias from the beginning, that could skew your results. In conjunction with this idea, once you have the final results from your testing, you must trust the conclusions you got. Even if what you saw goes against a principle of design or web development, if it’s proven to be useful to your particular website, it’s worth putting into practice.
Only Change One Variable At A Time
To have the most accurate A/B tests, it’s vital that you take it slow and only change one variable at a time. Jeremy Ellens, a contributor to HubSpot.com, shares that if you change multiple variables at one time, it will be nearly impossible to know which variable is causing a change in your metrics. This can make your tests completely worthless. So while you might think that changing a few things at a time to test will speed up the process, the opposite will actually be true. Therefore, it’s best to only change a small variable, like the color of a button or the wording of a single headline, before moving on to another variable you think you could improve.
Take The Time Necessary For Best Results
In order for A/B testing to be effective, you must allow the test to run for an adequate amount of time. While this amount can vary, Cameron Chapman, a contributor to KISSmetrics.com, recommends taking a few weeks to let your test run. If you cut the test off too soon, you won’t have an adequate amount of data to pull from. However, if you let the test run for too long, outside variables could have a bigger effect on your data. But because you want to have the best picture of what’s really happening with each sample of your page, it’s crucial that you give the test the chance to come up with the most accurate results for you.
If you’re considering running an A/B test on your website, use the tips mentioned above to ensure you do so correctly.
Originally posted on August 17, 2017 @ 2:22 pm