A/B testing and Conversion Rate Optimization

Companies are always searching for a way to increase foot traffic on their website. But foot traffic does not mean that your site is built well. Instead, what indicates the quilty of your site is the number of conversions that are going through. A/B testing and Conversion Rate Optimization are great tools to help any website achieve their conversion goals. Let's dig a little deeper, see what these two tools are, and their benefits.

A/B Testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the act of comparing two or more variations of a webpage or app against each other to determine which variation performs better. When conducting an A/B test, a web page will be modified to create a second version of the same page. Then, half of the traffic will see the original version, also known as control, and the other half will see the modified version, known as the variation. The results of the variations will be analyzed to see which variation had a better conversion rate. Utilizing A/B testing is an excellent way for businesses to see what content, web design, encourages visitors to create a conversion.

To conduct an A/B test, the website Optimeizely gives a great framework to follow.

• Collect data on pages that can be improved. Pages with low conversion rates is a great place to start.
• Identify goals in which you want to meet. A goal could be email signups or subscribe to a service.
• Generate a hypothesis for why you think the variation will better than the current version.
• Create variations which could be changing an element on your site or app. A change could be switching the color of a button or hiding the navigation elements.
• Run the experiment and wait for visitors to interact on your site. Visitors will be randomly assigned to control or variation of your experience. The interactions on each page will be measured, counted, and compared.
• Analyze results to see which page created more conversions and if there is a statistical difference.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

To understand what Conversion Rate Optimization is, first, let's look at what conversion and conversion rate means. A conversion is when a visitor completes a site goal, and a conversion rate is the number of conversions on a site divided by the total number of sessions. A higher conversion rate indicates your site is well designed, and visitors are completing site goals. 

Now coming back to Conversion Rate Optimization, this is the process of increasing site visitors that will complement your site's goals. Increasing site visitors involves testing numerous factors on a website to see if and how they impact conversions.

So why would a business want to use CRO? When companies can understand how their visitors interact on their sites, this can help them know why or why not conversions are happening. They can take that information and enhance their sites, which will help increase micro or macro conversions. Utilizing the CRO process has some distinct benefits, including improved customer insights, better ROI, better scalability, better user experience, and enhanced trust.

Who uses this?

Now that we looked at what A/B testing and CRO are and how they are great tools to increase conversions let's look at a company that benefited from A/B testing. Humana, a healthcare insurance provider, decided to use A/B testing on their banner ads and saw great results with the implemented changes. 

The control or the original banner add Humana was using had to much text on the banner, and it wasn't easy to understand the message. 

On variation B, Humana decided to simplify the message and have less wording. This change brought in 433% more clickthroughs than the control. 

Once Humana saw the success from variation B, they knew that the banner could be even better. In variation C, the Call-to-Action language was switched to something more noticeable to a visitor like " Shop medicare plans." This change managed to achieve a 192% increase in clickthroughs. 

Businesses need always to be testing to see what can be changed to improve their websites and bring in more conversions. A/B testing and CRO are those tools that will help test your webpages and bring in great results.