Why A/B tests increase conversion
The easiest way to explain why A/B tests are useful is with an everyday example. Have you ever wondered why your website visitors leave the page after a few seconds? What is it that keeps them from browsing multiple subpages? You may not be in the business that the visitor is looking for. More likely, however, is that the visitor found the right deal, but was deterred from further browsing by some element, phrase, or color on your page. How to check such things? Z/B tests.
There are several tools online that you can use to record a session of an individual designer, such as e.g. SmartLook , you get the statistics of the mouse movement path on the website such as e.g. HotJar or simply use Mixpanel to track specific website visitor events. The analysis of A/B tests can be done with the help of the Google Optimize tool.
Why do A/B tests?
There are many advantages to running A/B tests, but one of the most important is that you can back up your thesis with real data. We can lighten the thinking process by dividing the analysis strategy into several parts or building a tree structure of the analysis flow of the page we are checking. With every decision, we help each other with data and thus make more precise decisions. By analyzing A/B tests, we can increase the sales conversion percentage and reduce advertising costs. Test analyzes must be based on a larger data set of different customer segments. We must also compare the tests with other influences that could affect the analysis of the results (holidays, etc.).
How to start with A/B tests?
Initially, it is necessary to determine which goal we are trying to optimize. Is this a decrease in the bounce rate? Increase conversion when selling services? Is it easy to increase the click-through rate on a free trial?
When we have an idea about the goal of optimization, it is necessary to consider which tool will best help us in achieving the previously set goals. For example, if we want to check why people don’t click where they should, it’s best to use the aforementioned HotJar web application, which creates a heatmap of mouse movements. For more detailed analysis, we can also use SmartLook, which records entire browsing sessions of visitors. If we want to compare the conversion percentage of different versions of the landing page, we can use Google Optimize or Mixpanel. Google Optimize will be able to help us best with analytics.
We now have a set goal and a tool that will help us optimize the website so that we can achieve the set goal. All that remains is to get data from as many visitors as possible into our database. Namely, the larger the sample of visitors, the greater the chance that we can trace the pattern in the data and predict the necessary improvements to our website.
It is recommended to always have at least one A/B test in the analysis. Continuous improvement of the website is very important to improve the conversion itself. However, we must be careful not to test too much of the whole or too little of the elements. It is recommended to test different variations of layouts, colors, text, and page design itself. However, we must not forget that we must always have a large enough sample of test data, on which we then place the intended improvements of the website.