Improve Your Results With A/B Testing

Want to improve your marketing? One of the easiest ways is through A/B testing. This is a simple way that anyone can see on-going increases in the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. We all know that we want to see results from our advertising efforts. And we can spend a lot of time trying to understand the psychology of those we’re trying to market to. However, while understanding the thinking and the needs of prospective clients is still obviously important, the era of Big Data is increasing our ability to understand what encourages potential clients to do business with us. We can improve your results with A/B testing. It helps grow your ability to communicate with your clients in the most effective way.

Improve Your Results With A/B Testing in 4 Steps

1. Determine the Testing Reason

A/B testing is a great way to determine what the best on-line marketing strategies can work. First, we need to figure out what it is you want to test. You need to know what results you’re looking for with any given campaign. Do you want a landing page to increase calls or email signups? Do you want to increase traffic to your site? Do you want to see which ads have the best conversion rate? We determine what your end goal is before running A/B tests.

2. Choose What to Test

Next, we want to choose which variable you want to test, then control all other aspects. For example, if we’re trying to learn which landing page converts more traffic to your site from a search engine ad, we may want to test the following variables:

• The copy for your call-to-action
• Which color scheme works best on your landing page
• The layout of the page – for example, does having the CTA button work better on the left or on the right

3. Create the A and B Variants

Then we set up two different landing pages, controlling for all variables except for the ones we want to test. It’s important that we run both landing pages at the same time, fed by identical ad campaigns. We wouldn’t want to run one landing page for two weeks and then the other for the next two weeks and then compare results at the end of the month. An endless number of variations could occur in that time frame that could skew the results. Maybe the stock market takes a dive and temporarily changes people’s buying patterns, for example. Who knows? It’s crucial to control for every possible factor aside from the variable we want to test.

4. Analyze Results

Then at the end of your chosen time frame, we compare the results according to the criteria already selected.

The concept itself is simple. However, it can be run in a variety of creative ways to test what types of ads and designs work for different campaigns and goals. And we want A/B testing to be a continual process. That allows us to consistently improve the results from your marketing efforts.