Definition
A/B testing is an online experiment conducted on a website, mobile application or ads (among other things), to test potential improvements in comparison to a control (or original) version. Put simply, it it allows you to see which version works better for your audience based on a statistical analysis.
A/B Testing is also known as split testing, which can be either exactly the same thing as A/B testing OR mean split URL testing. For a classic A/B Test, the 2 variations are on the same URL, whereas split URL testing where your changed variation is on a different URL (your visitor doesn’t see the difference of course).
You compare the current version (control) of a page/element against a (or more) variation of it with the changes you want to test (website page, element in a page, a CTA, picture, …). You divide your traffic in equal portions, then they are randomly exposed to one or the other variation during a given period of time. Then, their performances (conversions, sales, …) are compared and analyzed to determine if the change(s) are worth implementing.
What are the benefits of A/B testing?
Why should YOU do A/B Testing? Or a better question is: Are you satisfied with the way you’re exploiting your hard-earned traffic? Once you have traffic, increasing your conversions is much less expensive with great potential ROI. And with A/B Testing, it’s even greater. But that’s not all, here are a couple of other benefits:
- Learn deeply about your audience with every test: what they like, how they react, their needs and habits.
- Remove gut decisions from your marketing strategy by adopting an experimentation culture and testing everything.
- Focus your time and money on what your visitors respond to best, thanks to the learnings of your A/B Tests.
Exemples
And to give you more operational examples of questions you’ll be able to answer with A/B Testing:
- Should you have long or short forms?
- Should you have long or short forms
- Should you implement this new feature?
- Which title for your article generates more shares?
- Which steps of your conversion funnels are underperforming?
