How to Do A/B Testing: 15 Steps for the Perfect Split Test
By lkolowich@hubspot.com (Lindsay Kolowich Cox)
When marketers like us create landing pages, write email copy, or design call-to-action buttons, it can be tempting to use our intuition to predict what will make people click and convert.
But basing marketing decisions off of a “feeling” can be pretty detrimental to results. Rather than relying on guesses or assumptions to make these decisions, you’re much better off running an A/B test — sometimes called a split test.
A/B testing can be valuable because different audiences behave, well, differently. Something that works for one company may not necessarily work for another. In fact, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts hate the term “best practices” because it may not actually be the best practice for you.
But A/B tests can also be complex. If you’re not careful, you could make incorrect assumptions about what people like and what makes them click — decisions that could easily misinform other parts of your strategy.
Keep reading to learn how to do A/B testing before, during, and after data collection so you can make the best decisions from your results.
To run an A/B test, you need to create two different versions of one piece of content, with changes to a single variable. Then, you’ll show these two versions to two similarly sized audiences and analyze which one performed better over a specific period of time (long enough to make accurate conclusions about your results).
A/B testing helps marketers observe how one version of a piece of marketing content performs alongside another. Here are two types of A/B tests you might conduct in an effort to increase your website’s conversion rate:
Example 1: User Experience Test
Perhaps you want to see if moving a certain call-to-action (CTA) button to the top of your homepage instead of keeping it in the sidebar will improve its click-through rate.
To A/B test this theory, you’d create another, alternative web page that uses the new CTA placement. The existing design with the sidebar CTA — or the “control” — is Version A. Version B with the CTA at the top is the “challenger.” Then, you’d test these two versions by showing each of them to a predetermined percentage of site visitors. Ideally, the percentage of visitors seeing either version is the same.
Learn how to easily A/B test a component of your website with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub.
Example 2: Design Test
Perhaps you want to find out if changing the color of your call-to-action (CTA) button can increase its click-through rate.
To A/B test this theory, you’d design an alternative CTA button with a different button color that leads to the same landing page as the control. If you usually use a red call-to-action button in your marketing content, and the green variation receives more clicks after your A/B test, this could merit changing the default color of your call-to-action buttons to green from now on.
Source:: HubSpot Blog
