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Back in the day, making a website for your business was straightforward and easy. All you needed to do was use a nice font, insert some great photos, and add some contact details.
Now, there’s an entire world within a website, leading us to learn about digital marketing and all of its complexities.
While reeling in as much traffic as possible and having an abundance of visitors on your online site is important, it’s not useful if they aren’t taking the actions you need them to (i.e. making a purchase.)
This is why it’s important to focus on conversation rates when doing a deep dive into your website.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a crucial part of your online business and can make all the difference in your sales. Often, digital marketers fail to recognize the importance of conversion rates. This means a loss in sales and new customers.
In this post, we’ll dive into one method that will help you to increase CRO and improve your sales—A/B testing.
Let’s get started!
Understanding Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO is the process of simplifying the process people need to navigate to take a certain action when visiting a website. Ideally, this action would result in a visitor making a purchase.
Established business websites, advertisements & conversion-focused landing pages are often designed to optimize conversion rates. Using landing pages for PPC ad campaigns, displaying recommended products, and using CTA buttons are just a few ways to convert visitors into paying customers.
And one of the most effective ways to get the best results and increase your conversion rates is A/B testing.
Why is that?
This method produces accurate data and solid results, which is something we can’t argue with. So, how does an A/B test work?
A/B testing works like this:
- Choose an aspect of your site you would like to test. This could include the implementation of a CTA button, pros and cons with your reviews or images.
- Decide on a change that you think will increase conversion rates.
- Test the new version with your original version by splitting traffic 50/50 to either site.
- Measure the results against each other and obtain new data.
With the data, you can see conversion rates as well as visitors’ time on the page. This should signify which method was more effective. A/B testing can be especially beneficial for customer journey orchestration, where insights can optimize each touchpoint in a customer’s journey.
Why Choose A/B Testing?
The question here really is, why not? A/B testing doesn’t just produce data that you can analyze, but it will provide you with answers. Instead of just wondering and guessing on what to do, you can properly test your theories.
Without sampling, you could be missing out on a whole lot of revenue. Nobody wants that.
A/B testing enables you, as a business, to explore all sorts of elements to your site and which ones lead to the highest conversion rate. Even simple alterations, such as changing the color of a CTA button, has been proven to affect conversion.
Setting up A/B Testing
The most convenient and popular way to try out a test is by using a visual website optimizer like Google Optimize. Through this platform, you can conduct any test you wish.
Although it’s called A/B testing and is insinuating you send 50% of traffic one way and 50% the other way, there is another way of dividing traffic that will lead to more clarity. Duplicate the original and send 10% to one, 45% to another, and 45% to your variant. Visual website optimizers don’t always pick up users who have disabled cookies and JavaScript, thus they will be sent to the original page.
A/B testing should be done every time you wish to make a change on your website (not only when you want to test a theory). This will prevent you from implementing a change that will impact your revenue or CRO negatively.
The Pros and Cons of A/B Testing for CRO
Pros
One of the obvious benefits of conducting an A/B test for your business website is that it can help improve conversion rates. It makes analyzing your website and your traffic straightforward and digestible. It’s fairly clear to distinguish which group has succeeded and which hasn’t.
Moreover, it can help reduce bounce rates. Any business involved in e-commerce will know the frustration of visitors bouncing from your site. By working through the various elements of your website, you may be able to eventually find the best combination to reel customers into a purchase.
Cons
A/B testing can be risky, especially if your business generally has quite a high number of visitors to the site. By sending a certain percentage of traffic to an inadequate test site, you may have essentially lost a substantial amount of sales.
There is also a possibility that A/B testing will result in duplicate content for your online site. Duplicate content can cause a bit of trouble with regards to SEO. This can result in a loss of rankings on search engines for your website.
Conclusion
There are a number of ways to increase your conversion rates, such as captivating PPC ads and keeping your ads and landing pages relevant. However, A/B testing seems to be an exceptionally insightful and effective way to focus on CRO. There are plenty of services to help your business thrive with this, if you need it.
While ultimately, it will help boost conversion rates, it can also be a great way to get to understand your business website a bit better and the tactics of digital marketing.
Guest contribution from Kurt Philip, Founder of Convertica
