A/B Testing vs. CRO: Which one should you be using?

A/B Testing

A/B Testing, sometimes known as split testing is a way firms improve their marketing by creating variations of their media whether it be their website, advertisements or other marketing content. This can be done by splitting their audience into two categories A and B to test different variations of the same form of content. This allows them to pit two of their versions against each other in real time without having to conduct study groups or spend more time using their entire audience for one version at a time. A/B testing can help in several different ways:

Understanding User Behavior: A/B testing helps better understand how users are navigating or interacting with their content to find differences and similarities in their behavior based on the content they viewed.

Optimizing Websites and Apps: By comparing two forms of websites or apps side-by-side, marketers can find and understand what is working and what is not so they can design the most efficient and user-friendly website or app based on their tests.

Reducing Guesswork: A/B testing can answer many questions at once by testing multiple variables in each variation which is great for reducing guessing and prophesizing on which option is the best for one's audience. Even though marketing is king, we're still not gods... yet.

Increasing Conversions: This is the ultimate goal of marketing and is one of the reasons why A/B testing is so useful for marketers. A/B testing can show us which version or variable within that version is working best to drive conversions because as marketers we are OBSESSED with conversions. ??

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion Rate Optimization is simply the process of finding ways to increase conversions through a number of factors. The idea of CRO is less specifically defined as A/B testing is because there are multiple ways to do so through different variables in your website or other content. First off, a conversion rate is how many conversions a website obtains out of the users that visit and it can be calculated by: (# of conversions) / (total visitors). CRO can be implemented in a number of ways:

Home Page: This is usually the first thing a page visitor will see so it's best to make it count because as Billy Zane said, "With me, it's all about first impressions." I think we can all take a little bit from that quote especially when it comes to using deodorant before meeting people. Making sure to have an inviting and easy to navigate homepage will really help in putting visitors on the right track to a conversion.

Pricing Page: This can be a tricky one for visitors as it can be the page that people click off from. Having prices is one thing but displaying them can be a whole other thing. Pricing different products or services out using intervals such as per year or per month payments can really help communicate an easier looking price to many users making the purchase feel less daunting all while not needing to change the price.

What's the difference?

Yes, CRO and A/B testing are quite similar but are different in certain ways as well. The first one that was briefly mentioned is the scope of what they are. A/B testing is quite a specific term and CRO is a more broad term relating to different tactics and aspects of a website, app or other content. How they are different also points to how they can work together. Tying back to CRO within a website, for a firm to better optimize their pricing page they could use A/B testing to do so. One page could showcase full prices for products, and another could display interval payments. Going even further, if the interval payments look to perform better, a firm could then test monthly interval payments against yearly interval payments. This a great example of using A/B testing to utilize CRO, two different but related ideas.

Who's good at it?

Optimizely is known for their... well optimization of marketing tools! They are a great instrument for marketers who are trying to go the extra mile in their marketing objectives. Their entire business model orbits around marketing and helping others do so with a great emphasis on data driven testing and optimization.

On their website they host many tools to help marketers and one of them just happens to be A/B testing. Through their experiments site, users can input their own marketing content, create variations, test them and gather data all within their hub. This is a great tool for marketers who want pre-made infrastructure that allows them to focus on their goals rather than having to design their own.

Uber is also known for using a form of A/B testing to improve their service and business model. Around 7 years ago they launched an experimentation site called Morpheus to test their user experience and better optimize it. Their objectives were to achieve high quality assurance among users and to be trusted to give good, reliable results. This platform was created simply for testing and experimenting to better develop their main platform.

Uber's use of Morpheus space allows them to have a digital space purely made for testing. This is a technique that is a little different than more traditional testing but shows Uber as an example of a new and innovative way to do so. Having Morpheus also mitigates risk of having tests produce negative results by containing them so that they don't affect Uber's bottom line.