If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here? There’s no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first choice when users encounter a site without an optimized user experience for conversion.
Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. A page where traffic is sent to, to perform a specific conversion or call to action is often called a landing page. Usability or A/B testing (or multivariate) to find the best landing page in terms of visitor conversion is one of the most important aspects to boost your website sales or lead generation i.e. overall convesion. Sales and lead generation landing pages are often the target of A/B tests although it is possible to test any page so long as you have a conversion metric to measure.
First of all we must understand what A/B testing actually is – A/B testing does a comparative test, version A, against a different version, version B to measure which is the most successful based on the metric you are measuring.On your landing page A/B testing allows you to split traffic on your website so that visitors experience uniquely setup web page content on version A and version B of a page while you analyse visitor actions and identify the version that yields the highest conversion rate. A conversion rate is the rate at which visitors perform a desired action on your site. By testing with live visitors on your site you learn from real users which experience they prefer.Conversion rates can also be measured in terms of revenue. Instead of the number of sales you can measure the impact of a change on sales revenue. The time period should allow you enough time to gather sufficient data to gauge real insight about your A/B tests. Identify the number of unique visitors and/or conversions needed to establish good data and then determine how long it will take you to generate this traffic. This number will vary from business to business, but should give you enough data to confidently declare a “winner.” However, there is more you can do with A/B Split testing.
- You can use A/B split testing to better understand visitor behaviors and priorities when visiting your site.
- You can use A/B split testing to solve specific problems you have with your site pages. In other words, use it as a diagnostic tool to find out what is going wrong and how to fix it.
- You can use A/B split testing to dramatically challenge assumptions you may have about the “best” way to design or write a page. (Test not only changes in minor elements, but also complete and dramatic redesigns of an entire page.)
What Tools to Use – Google Website Optimizer is perhaps the most used and easily available tool for A/B Testing experiments. Testing yields the most valuable results only when you test repeatedly. A one-shot test will tell you very little. But when you make a consistent habit of testing, cumulative tests over time can have a dramatic impact on the success of your site.
Many other commercial tools such as Optimize.ly, Offermatica, Google Enterprise Analytics, Omniture can also help in A/B testing.
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