How do you compare different website versions?

Website comparison is one of the tactics in a holistic marketing strategy gamut. To ensure that the tactic is in the right direction, it is necessary to understand your target audience and segment them based on data derived from attributes like technographic, psychographics, and behavior which will guide website optimization (website comparison). Leading to an increase in engagement rate and session time on your website which are key contributors to website ranking. With the right mix of testing mechanisms and CTAs websites can achieve business goals and enhance ROI.

Don’t underestimate the value of experimentation: Rely on data, not just intuition. Test, iterate, optimize. Deploy both A/B and Multivariate: A/B tests focus on single changes, while multivariate tests examine combinations. Both have their uses. Set Clear Metrics: Define success – be it CTR, session time, or conversions – before testing. Don’t forget that testing needs direction: Always start with a clear hypothesis. Aimless testing yields aimless results. Sample size counts and ensure a broad enough sample to avoid skewed data. Also you need to choose the right tools so you can rely on trusted industry tools for accurate, seamless testing. Remember, continuous optimization as the backbone of a winning digital strategy.

Apart from this Zapier, MixPanel & Microsoft Clarity help in understanding user behviour across different versions with the help of heat maps and session recordings .

Collect user feedback to understand why they behave a certain way on your website using tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms. Eg. To understand why a newly introduced feature is not gaining traction, you could pop up a quick survey for users who didn't interact with it. This qualitative data can complement your quantitative metrics. Key Metrics Bounce Rate: A lower bounce rate generally suggests better engagement. Page Load Time: Faster load times usually lead to better user experience and potentially higher conversions. Conversion Rate: Directly measures the percentage of users completing a desired action. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures how many users click a specific link out of the total who view a page or email.

Use Heatmaps to visualize where users click, scroll, and hover on your website. Use tools like Crazy Egg, or Hotjar Example: If you've redesigned your homepage and want to compare user interaction between the old and new designs, you could deploy heatmaps on both. By comparing where users click or hover, you can identify which design elements are more engaging.

Do A/B Testing to compare two versions of a webpage, say Version A and Version B, to determine which performs better in terms of a particular metric (like click-through rates, conversion rates, etc.). You can use Google Optimize, Optimizely, VWO Example: Let's say you have an e-commerce site and you're trying to increase the conversion rate of your product page. You could create two different versions of the 'Add to Cart' button — one in red and one in blue. You'd then split your audience into two random groups and show each group a different button color. After a sufficient amount of time, you would analyze which color resulted in more conversions.