Read These 6 Tips to take advantage of A/B Testing

Updated on: March 25, 2020 · 7 mins read

Categories: seo |

A/B testing is the procedure of finding out which design works and which doesn’t.

1. Step 1: Creating separate pages
2. Step 2: Allotting separate population allocation to different pages
3. Analyze
4. Replace
5. Why you should do A/B testing
6. Sales figures change drastically
7. Continuous improvement of the user experience
8. Little to no user confusion
9. Saves companies from losing money if something goes wrong
10. How A/B testing is done properly
11. Creating different designs
12. Dividing the population
13. Ship the changes
14. Analyze the usage
15. Keep or Replace
16. A/B testing and SEO benefits
17. Google encourages A/B testing
18. How to do it in your blog
19. Some theorotical examples.
20. E-commerce
21. Sports application
22. Conclusion

AB testing is also known as bucket testing or split testing.

Following are the steps of A/B testing:

Step 1: Creating separate pages

In this form of testing, you create two or more versions of your webpage with whatever changes you want to test for.

Step 2: Allotting separate population allocation to different pages

Both forms of pages are shown to a set of users. You can choose how you want to divide the number of people seeing different pages.

Analyze

According to the conversion rate and other metrics, a decision is made on which page is doing better.

Replace

Finally, the bad performing page is replaced by the better performing page.

This is the main guideline through which the A/B testing works. You can leave the article right there if that is what you wanted to know.

After this, we are going to discuss various things related to A/B testing in detail.

Why you should do A/B testing

Before diving into how you should do A/B testing let’s first discuss on why should someone care about A/B testing and how is it important for your business.

Sales figures change drastically

Say, you are owning a big firm and you change the design of your website and suddenly you start getting 2x number of sales.

You came to know about changing just the design of the website can move the number so radically.

Now let’s say earlier you were making 1000 dollars every day. With the incoming design now you are making 2000 dollars each day.

Good, right.

Now that you know that design is important, you asked your team to make a new design with a few improvements that you thought might be useful for the customer.

The design team was quick and was ready with the solution in 2 weeks.

You shipped the product in the excitement in the morning and went out to a meeting. When you came back at night and looked into the numbers of sales, they went from 2000 dollars to 200 dollars.

Hopefully, you got the point which I was trying to make.

In business, never do something if you think something is going to work. Back your hypothesis with some numbers.

That’s the point where A/B testing can help your business.

Continuous improvement of the user experience

Rather than having a drastic change in the user experience A/B testing believe in doing it in small iterations. Every time you keep on moving the changes, everything starts showing up to a limited set of users.

Over time the population coverage for all users become 100% which was the initial target.

I have seen some companies keeping separate designs for users depending upon the click history and mouse movement history of the user. Although this is drastic and should not be followed blindly this shows how far are companies willing to go for getting more sales.

Little to no user confusion

With steady changes in the designs of your pages, you can save users from confusions.

Saves companies from losing money if something goes wrong

It saves companies from losing a tone of money if something goes wrong with the design. Some designs might be offensive for some ethnic background. You will get to know about these things early if your designs changes are only visible to a fewer set of customers.

How A/B testing is done properly

A/B testing can be as small as changing the header for some users or changing the image for a different set of customer. Size of change doesn’t matter for a change to be an A/B testing.

The existing version of the page is known as the control and the page with the change is known as variation.

Creating different designs

In this part, two or more designs are prepared. This can involve any amount of changes in both the version of the same web page. Some companies reveal the new feature to a smaller set of the population (Commonly known as a Beta release of a feature).

For example, WhatsApp has given access to WhatsApp business APIs to very few businesses.

This is done to limit the usage and find the bugs in the platform at an early stage.

Dividing the population

The division of the population can be done on any basis. Some try to do it by ethnic background. Some try to do it using geographic data. For some companies, it is random.

Facebook has open-sourced this awesome A/B testing tool which can be used to make plans related to A/B testing:

Ship the changes

Once done, you can ship the changes to the target population and wait for the numbers to pour in.

Analyze the usage

There can be any number of metrics that you want to choose for analyzing the usage by the customer. The usage by the customer will define the result of the testing. Was it a failure or a success.

Conversion should be the main factor in deciding the fate of the variation design changes.

Keep or Replace

You should not keep different versions of the same webpage for too long if they are not meant to be different for different people( We will discuss later). As soon as you find the analysis results either keep the changes or replace the changes.

That’s how the A/B testing framework works.

A/B testing and SEO benefits

A/B testing is also very helpful for SEO. Google recognises and rewards your effort to provide better solutions for your customers.

Google encourages A/B testing

Google itself has made it clear that websites should make use of such a feature for improving the user experience. But they always had spoken against clock.

Clocking is the process in which you divide the population on basis of something and show different content to crawlers and different to users.

This can be done by dividing the target population by IP. Google crawlers has a special set of IPs and some websites try to fool crawlers by showing them something which is not there.

People do something like this to hide illegal stuff on there website from the crawlers.

These type of activities will allow the search engine to permanently penalize your website.

How to do it in your blog

There are a lot of tools which you can use to make it happen on your blog.

WordPress provides this plugin to help you with the task

Nelio A/B testing tool

If your site is on Jekyll, use this

Biased Bit A/B testing

Some theorotical examples.

How can this be beneficial for a different type of websites?

E-commerce

E-commerce websites can show different pages to see the difference in the sales for the same pages having different designs.

Sports application

Sports website can choose from various ways of showing the scorecards and player statistics.

Conclusion

In the end, we can say that it is a good practice to make use of A/B testing for your website or business. We recommend following various SEO practices while making use of this awesome technique.

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