A/B Testing and Conversion Rate Optimization: How to optimize your site for your audience

When examining your business' online presence, an important question to ask is whether or not your current website is at working at the optimum level. The good news is that there are a few ways to figure out the answer to this question, two of which are A/B testing and conversion rate optimization (CRO). 

What is A/B testing and why should I do it?

A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of an existing web page or app in order to determine which one performs better. The variations you can test can range from a simple button placement, to an entirely different page design. Due to the vast scope of what you can compare, A/B testing allows you to test virtually every part of your website. With the data you can gain from doing these tests, you can determine exactly how optimized your website is for your audience; and if you need to make any changes. Some great benefits you can gain from A/B testing include better user experience and engagement, as well as increased sales. Brightedge has a great rundown of other perks that can come with A/B testing.

How Do I Do It?

Before you can start testing, you need to have a hypothesis that can be tested via A/B testing. This involves deciding which elements of your web page you’d like to change, and then creating a copy of your current website with those tested changes. Then with some software like Optimizely, you split web traffic so that half your visitors will see the new site, and half will see your current one. As these visitors engage in activities on your site, data will be collected from both pages, allowing you to evaluate the effectiveness of any changes.

What is CRO and why should I do it?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the conversion rate for your website, i.e. turning site visitors into customers. CRO enables you to see how site visitors are interacting with your website, and evaluate the site’s performance based on intuitive metrics. From these metrics, you can determine a percentage value of how many site visitors turn into customers for your business. This matters because it can save you both time and money. Having access to this customer data allows you to make changes faster, and can make choices easier as your business changes scale. 

How Do I Do It?

The good news is that conversion rate calculations are pretty easy to do, but also depend on how your website classifies a conversion. For example, if you were an e-commerce site that sold teddy bears and wanted to track how many visitors ordered out of total visitors, you would divide the number of unique orders by the number of sessions; giving you the conversion rate. (Image Source: Moz)

However, if you were instead a subscription based service that sent teddy bears via mail every month, you’d want to calculate your conversion rate differently; as users can only convert once regardless of visits due to your business model. In this case you would then divide the number of orders by unique users, which would tell you how what percentage of your visitors are buying subscriptions. (Image Source: Moz)

Can I See An Example?

A great and simple example of A/B testing in motion can be seen with Humana’s banner ads. In 2014, Humana wanted to test a variation of their banner ad that would show up on web pages. While their current banner ad (on the left) was very informative, it was not getting the activity that Humana wanted. So Humana developed a hypothesis, which was that a streamlined banner ad that focused on customer experience would be more effective (on the right). When Humana launched the test, the result was a 433% increase in clickthroughs according to Design For Founders, a staggering metric to say the least. This enabled them to increase their web traffic and optimize their ad campaign for their audience.

Key Takeaways

Looking through these different methods, it’s clear that optimizing your website for your audience is an important step for any business to take. The amount of time and money you can save makes it well worth examining how you can implement these technologies for your website. If you are still curious and want to learn more about the software used for these tests, check out Optimizely's view on the topic.