What is AB Testing in Inbound / Online Marketing?

1. What is AB Testing in Online Marketing? AB also known as Split Testing, AB Testing is the comparison of two web page versions to find out the one that performs better. A/B Testing typically compares these two web pages by showing the two factors or variants simply referred to as A and B to similar visitors at an exact time (same time). The page that gives the best “conversion rate” wins fair and square! But what actually is AB Testing in online Marketing? Every website out there has a goal that it intends to achieve. Usually it could be that they want their visitors to buy products or to click on ads and to sign up for paid up subscriptions. In every way almost everyone out there is in the business of online marketing.. Since they want their visitors to convert into potential sales, the rate at which any website is able to do this is the “conversion rate” which is the key variable factor that AB Testing compares in these two different web pages in order to find out the best performer.

2. What Are The Merits Of AB Testing In Your Online Business? Simply put AB Testing gives you a chance to make more out of your existing traffic. What AB does is, it determines the significant increase in the sales, revenue, and leads generated at any given time on your webpage due to a simple change in marketing strategy such as on a landing page, call to action, social proof, or testimonials. How Can You Plan To Carry Out AB Testing For Your Online Business? The very first thing to do is to figure out what you want to test. If you are running an off-site test you can either test an ad or a sales email. But for an on-site test you’ll want to figure out the specific elements that you’d want to test in all the sales related pieces on your website.

3.  Test an ad to see which ad brings in more converting visitors.  Test two versions of emails to see which one brings more conversions. This shows you where to focus your advertisements efforts and also justifies spending more money on it. A/B Testing thus helps you to reach a final decision prior to making any marketing change to your online business. What Can You Test? Depending on what affects your visitor’s conversion behavior on your website, AB can be used to test it. They will include.  Headlines  Sub Headlines  Paragraph texts  Landing Pages  Call to Action Text/ Button  Media Mentions  Links  Images  Social Proof

4. How Can You Test? Once you’ve identified what to test it’s always commendable to make a list of variables that you will test. For instance, if you decide to test a Call To Action Text or Button you could test the following.  The CTA’s Location  The exact CTA’s Text  The CTA’s Button Color / Surrounding Space Which Process Best Suits AB Testing?   First, ask questions and know your website’s bounce rate. Do enough research with Google Analytics to understand your visitor’s behavior.  Construct a great hypothesis and add links in the footer to reduce bounce rate.  Calculate the number of visitors and days you want to run the test.  Test your hypothesis against the original page and measure the bounce rate.  Analyze data and draw conclusions. The A/B Testing process is awesome for any business that wants to stamp their online authority, enhance marketing changes, or understand their overall performance. Apart from looking into how to carry out an AB test, its merits, and what you can test, also knows the following. The SEO implications of AB Testing as posted in their blog “Website Testing And Google Search have these top tips that every online marketer must know.  When running an AB Test that redirect your users from the original URL, use 302 or simply the temporary redirect.  Do not exceed the amount of time required for your AB Testing experiment. Usually reliable tests will vary depending on how much traffic your site receives or the conversion rate.  Finally, no cloaking (showing one set of questions to your visitors and a different set to Googlebot).