What Are the Benefits of A/B Testing for your Business? 

The key to getting the most out of marketing campaigns – such as PPC advertising – is optimizing your materials to better suit your target audience and capture potential leads. No marketing campaign or webpage will ever be right the first time, and will need continually adjusting over its lifetime.  

How can you empirically tell whether or not changes are successful or effective? The answer is: A/B testing. Through an A/B test, you can identify which changes to your content will improve conversions. 

This ability to optimize marketing campaigns has led to industry analysts such as Forbes’s Jon Simpsons brandishing A/B tests as the “next industry golden egg”.  

Here at NoA Ignite, we believe in the importance of a great digital experience for your customers.

What is A/B testing?

First, let’s cover what A/B testing actually is. Also known as split testing, it is a technique for experimenting with and measuring the impact of changes to a marketing campaign or webpage.  

Here, leads (or subjects) are shown one of two versions of the same webpage, email, advertisement, or other digital material, and the results are measured to determine how effective a change is in achieving a business goal.  

The most common implementation shows 50% of visitors one version of your marketing material – the “control” – whereas the other 50% get the “variant”.  

What does “Variant A” in a/b testing usually represent? Well, that’s the original version of the webpage or asset – how it was before the change (hence why we call it a control). The “Variant B” is the experimental version of the asset. 

What digital assets are suitable for A/B testing? 

We can test a wide range of assets and marketing materials. Here are some of the most common examples:

• Emails
• Webpages – such as landing pages or product pages
  • On-site elements such as banners, pop-ups, support bubbles etc.
• PPC Advertisements
• SEO content such as blogs or articles
  • Within these, marketing teams usually split test titles, call to action, article length or structures to better understand how readers engage with their content.

Of course, just because the asset you’re experimenting with is on the above list, it doesn’t mean an A/B test is guaranteed to work. We’ll discuss what factors affect the success of A/B testing later on. 

What are the benefits?  

Simple & easy to execute & analyse 

Compared to other marketing research methods, A/B testing is certainly one of the more straightforward options. On websites, there are a wide range of plugins that can automate this process for you. 

Our experts at NoA Ignite can set up an A/B testing system in minutes and begin to measure the impact of changes. 

A huge benefit is the ease of analysis. Given your variants get enough traffic to measure their results, we can easily use engagement tools to measure data for analysis.  

We can get a clear picture of how much conversion rates increase, where visitors tend to click and (for on-site elements) whether visitors interact with the asset at all. There are likely to be clear “winners” and “losers” in each test that help inform an iterative optimization workflow.  

Making traffic more valuable 

Split testing aims to optimize your content and advertisements. The name of the game for any marketing strategy is to increase conversions and thus boost revenue. 

To better manage a marketing budget, we need to optimize materials to better appeal to leads and encourage them to convert to paying customers. Therefore, A/B testing is a technique to boost conversion rates.  

It’s relatively easy to demonstrate the value of A/B testing in the realm of PPC advertising such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. If you spend €200 on Google Ads that convince 20 visitors to check out your site – but your product page only has a 20% conversion rate, 16 visitors – on average – would leave without buying anything. 

Let’s say you use A/B testing to optimize your page – and your conversion rate increases to 40%. That same €200 spent on Google Ads will result in more paying customers and thus more revenue. Optimizing marketing materials is all about stretching your marketing spend further – and making the traffic to your website more valuable. 

Improve customer experience & engagement 

By testing variants of a digital asset one at a time, you can measure which changes best impact how customers use your website or interact with advertisements. This granular visibility of each element change helps you craft digital experiences that are optimized for customer engagement.  

Let’s take the example of a landing page with the “variant B” changing the font of the page. If users spend more time on the “variant B” and more visitors click “learn more”, we can infer that the variant font and size improve the user experience.  

A/B testing best practices 

What ensures that A/B testing gives you actionable, accurate results? Here are some best practices to follow:  

• Ensure changes are significant: A/B testing is useful for informing businesses which changes are successful – but only if variants A and B are significantly different from each other. If the changes are too small to be noticeable – for instance too similar a font change, or too small a colour change – the results of the test will be irrelevant. 
• Test only one change at a time: It’s also important to ensure that the experimental variant only has one change – or you won’t be able to judge which change made a difference.
• Be selective with what you test: You can’t test everything. Where should you test? Focus on pages and marketing campaigns that have poor conversion rates. This helps get you the best return on investment (ROI). 
• Consider how you’ll measure your results: To do this, figure out what your goal is? Are you trying to increase conversions? Your conversion rate is a good metric. Are you looking to improve customer satisfaction and provide a better experience? This is trickier to measure.
  • A common method used is on-site surveys that appear as your visitors browse your site. You may prefer to use A/B testing in a controlled environment such as a customer survey. Here, you can get long-form feedback by showing participants each variant after each other.  

Improve digital experiences with NoA Ignite  

When used effectively, A/B testing is a brilliant tool for optimizing your user experience and getting the most out of a marketing campaign.  

Let our experts help you navigate the world of split testing and help you figure out what your customers want from your digital platform.  

Our services help you build engaging digital experiences for every touchpoint. The iterative optimization process A/B testing thrives on can only be powered by flexible software architecture. 

Get in touch with us today and see how we can help fuel your digital growth!