A/B Testing

Dr. Rohit Kumar Sachan

What is A/B Testing in Digital Marketing?
• A/B testing is one of the most important elements of conversion rate
optimization, but what is A/B testing in digital marketing exactly?

• How do tech marketers use it to increase their landing

page conversion rates and achieve better campaign ROI?

• The answer is A/B testing.

What is A/B Testing in Digital Marketing?
• A/B testing in digital marketing is a type of content experiment where
marketers create two variations of a landing page or web page to
determine which one performs the best against defined marketing
objectives.

• The best way to understand A/B testing is to understand it in relation

to the other most common types of context experiments: split tests
and multivariate tests.
• A split test, or split URL test, is a content experiment where marketers
present two completely different landing pages to different groups of
customers, then measure conversions to determine which landing page
performed better.
• In an A/B test, digital marketers do not use completely different landing
pages. Instead, they use variations of the same page with just one
element changed, such as the call-to-action, sales copy, or the color or
position of an element on the page.
• While split testing measures the difference in performance between
two completely different pages, A/B testing tries to find performance
improvements by making minor changes to individual page elements
and measuring any resulting changes in clicks or conversions.
• Some digital marketers also use multivariate testing experiments to
improve website performance.
• A multivariate test is just like an A/B test, but instead of changing just
one element on the page, marketers produce several variations of
several different elements.
• These variations can be combined in different ways and presented to
consumers to determine which combination of changes produces the
best campaign outcomes.
Image: Software tools like Google Optimize make it easy for digital marketers to create, execute and evaluate the results
of content experiments for any landing page on their website.
A/B Testing Use Cases
• A/B testing in digital marketing has revolved around landing pages,
but there are actually many different applications for A/B testing in
digital marketing.
• We highlight some of the most important use cases for A/B testing,
illustrating its importance for digital marketers employing a variety of
marketing tactics and techniques:
• Email Marketing
• Landing Page Design
• Text Ad Optimization
• Display Ad Optimization
• eCommerce Websites
A/B Testing Process Overview
• The specific process that digital marketers use for A/B testing changes
based on their chosen marketing medium.
• Constructing an A/B test for an email marketing campaign looks a lot
different in practice than constructing an A/B test to compare the
performance of product descriptions in your eCommerce store, for
example.
Process Steps
• Identify Opportunities for Improvement
• Create a Hypothesis
• Craft Variants
• Run a Content Experiment
• Measure and Analyze Results
Identify Opportunities for Improvement
• The first step in the A/B testing process is to identify a landing page,
marketing email, product description, or any other specific element of
your marketing campaign that will be targeted for improvement.
• Review the marketing data that you collect to identify areas of your
campaign that you think could be improved with an A/B testing content
experiment.
• As an example, you could choose to review Google Analytics data for
landing pages on your website to determine which one has the lowest
conversion rate. You might decide that the landing page with the lowest
conversion rate offers the best opportunity to achieve measurable
improvements with A/B testing.
Create a Hypothesis
• Hypothesis should describe a proposed new variant of the page and why you
believe it will produce a better result in your upcoming context experiment.
• For your under-performing landing page, you might reason that users are
converting at a low rate because the lead generation form is too long. As a
result, you might construct a hypothesis that says:
• “I believe that I can increase the conversion rate on this page by redesigning
the lead generation form to make it shorter and more accessible for visitors
who land on this page.”
• You could also decide that conversion rates are low because the CTA button
is the wrong color, or because the sales copy is not persuasive enough. These
are all elements that you can test, but in the spirit of A/B testing, you want to
measure just one element at a time.
Craft Variants
• Once you create a hypothesis around the specific element you wish to
test, the next step is to actually produce a different variant of the
same page that you will use in your content experiment.
• You can do this manually using your website content management
system, but it’s much easier to rely on a CRO tool like Google
Optimize or Optimizely that helps streamline and partially automate
the process of constructing test variants of your page.
Image: Optimizely is an A/B testing software tool that automatically measures the performance of your baseline page against
created variants to determine which one results in the highest conversion rate.
Run a Content Experiment
• Once you have crafted a variant of your initial page, it’s time to
configure and run your content experiment. Conversion rate
optimization software tools are useful again here, enabling digital
marketers to customize which audiences land on which page or easily
split traffic between multiple landing page variations.
• To ensure that your results are accurate and useful, make sure that
you expose a statistically significant number of users to each variation
of your page.
Measure and Analyze Results
• Now that you have identified a hypothesis, crafted variants, and run your
content experiment live on your website, the final step is to measure and
analyze the results of your experiment to determine whether it was a
success.
• Your A/B testing software tool will automatically measure conversions
that result from both variations of your landing page, then use statistical
methods to determine whether your hypothesis was proven correct.
• The success of this analysis depends on the sample size of your
experiment: the more users who interact with your page variations, the
more reliably your A/B testing software will be able to determine whether
your new variations had a genuine impact on your campaign results.
References
• https://directiveconsulting.com/blog/what-is-ab-testing-in-digital-mar
keting/