9 A/B Testing Examples From Real Businesses
Whether you’re looking to increase revenue, sign-ups, social shares, or engagement, A/B testing and optimization can help you get there.But for many marketers out there, the tough part about A/B testing is often finding the right test to drive the biggest impact — especially when you’re just getting started.
So, what’s the recipe for high-impact success?
Truthfully, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe. What works for one business won’t work for another — and vice versa.
But just because you can’t replicate the same test and expect the same result doesn’t mean you can’t get inspired by other companies’ tests.
In this post, let’s review how an hypothesis will get you started with your testing, and review excellent examples from real businesses using A/B testing. While the same tests may not get you the same results, they can get you inspired to run creative tests of your own.
A/B Testing Hypothesis Examples
A hypothesis can make or break your experiment, especially when it comes to A/B testing. When creating your hypothesis, you want to make sure that it is:
- Focused on one specific problem you want to solve or understand
- Able to be proven or disproven
- Focused on making an impact (bringing higher conversion rates, lower bounce rate, etc.)
When creating a hypothesis, following the “If, then” structure can be helpful, where if you changed a specific variable, then a particular result would happen. Here are some examples of what that would look like in an A/B Testing Hypothesis:
- Shortening contact submission forms to only contain required fields would increase the number of sign-ups.
- Changing the call-to-action text from “Download now” to “Download this free guide” would increase the number of downloads.
- Reducing the frequency of mobile app notifications from 5 times per day to 2 times per day will increase mobile app retention rates.
- Using featured images that are more contextually related to our blog posts will contribute to a lower bounce rate.
- Greeting customers by name in emails will increase the total number of clicks.
Let’s go over some real-life examples of A/B testing to prepare you for your own.
1. HubSpot’s Site Search
Most websites contain a search bar at the top of the page that gives users the ability to search for a specific topic or term.
Based on previous data, HubSpot found that non-bounce desktop users who engage with search have a 163.8% higher blog lead conversion rate than those who do not. However, only a very small percent of blog traffic interacts with the search bar. That’s why HubSpot decided to test the visual prominence and functionality of the site search bar.
HubSpot used three variants for this test, using offer thank you page views as the primary metric.
For variant A, the site search bar increased visual prominence and altered the placeholder text to “search by topic.”
For variant B, …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
