Value of A/B Testing

A/B testing

In today’s article, I will be discussing a few things about A/B testing.

Experiments have always been run but in different ways by scientists, sailors, philosophers etc, but in the marketplace, A/B testing really started to gain grounds in 2006 when google optimizer came into play. They created a free solution that could do JavaScript redirect and inject codes into web pages. And then in 2010, VWO and Optimizer came into the marketplace and they created a drag and drop solution for A/B testing which made it easy to run marketing experiments. By 2016, A/B testing evolved as the quality of tools became better and A/B testing became a lot easier.

The Value of A/B testing

Some companies see A/B testing as a big silver bullet when it comes to maximizing their marketing efficiency. This is because of the value A/B testing has to offer. So, what is that value? The real value of A/B testing is that it helps you make better trustworthy decisions. A/B testing helps to make sure you're making the right decisions and speed up and have trustworthy decisions and not just expert opinions.

Now we know the value of A/B testing, another question now is when do you use A/B testing?

When to use A/B testing

If you have data for /B tests, when can you run experiments? There are several reasons;

·        Deployment. The fist reason is deployment. When you deploy something on your website, it could be because of legal reasons, a new feature, could be an update, or whatever. You want to deploy this as an experiment. You want to learn if your deployment does not have a negative impact on the KPI show measuring. If it has no negative impact, you can deploy it. If it goes down then you don't want to deploy it.

·        Research. The second reason for A/B testing is research. Research can be split into more parts. The first thing you can use it for is a conversion signal map. Here, you have a specific webpage with all the elements and run experiments by just leaving out elements and You're looking to see if leaving out some elements has some impact, or no impact So you can pick which one to optimize. Another thing you can do with research is to show fly-ins. Here you want to test to see if social proof is working on your website. So you make a fly-in to draw attention and people will notice it. If the messages are really annoying, they could lower conversions but mostly they don't. This is research to learn if it has an impact, or no impact at all, or even has a negative impact not for optimizing. It is a research using A/B-testing of research before you optimize something.

Get insights for you’re A/B tests.

How do you get insight for you’re a/B tests? It simply research. If you want to get more quality and higher winning percentage of A/B testing, then you have to research upfront.

The 6V model for conducting a proper research.

The 6V model is all about the value of the company, it's all about verses, your competition, it's views of the data, it's voice of the customer, It's verified data and validated data. So, we have six parts, value, versus, view, validated, verified, voice.

·        Value. The first V is value. What company values are important and relevant? What focus delivers the most business impact? You need to know the short-term goals, long-term goals, what is the strategy of the company, you need to know the product focus and know the KPI focus of the company. What is really important to the company!

·        Versus. The next V is versus. You need to know who your competitors are, are there any market best practices you can use? What market changes are occurring around you? You can ask google, you probably know on which keywords you want to be found, with your products or your services. Just type in these keywords and see which competitors are advertising, or are really popping up high in the organic results, that is a way to discover competitors and track changes on their website. You can also listen to their A/B tests.

·        View. The next V is view. View of the customer. What insights can be found from web analytics and web behavior data. If you want to get a first experience with a website, you want to know the basic behavior of the users. So why did they start a website, where did it come from? Do they have a specific flow going into the website, are there notable differences between specific segments or product, is it modeled for different desktop behavior? Are there lots of new visitors, returning visitors. What products are they selling, what services are selling? Is there a difference in behavior when you buy certain products? And what's the behavior of the most important pieces? These are questions you will want to answer.

·        Voice. The next V is voice. The voice of the customer. Analytics can show you behavior, but it doesn't tell you why. So talk to customer service. If your website uses chat logs, go through the chats and see what customers are saying. You can use social media, if you want to know what customers think of your competitors and what questions they have for your competitors.

·        Verified. The next V is verified. What scientific research, insights and models are available? it's really valuable to understand what do we know from scientific literature for this specific productor this specific company, this specific group of users.

·        Validated. The next V is validated. What insights are validated in previous experiments or analyses?

That’s it for this article, I will be posting more articles in the following weeks with more knowledge and insight about Growth Marketing.

If you want to learn more in detail about growth marketing or any other marketing course, feel free to visit CXL Institute website. They have a wide range of marketing courses and top 1% professionals in different fields of marketing that impact first class knowledge. You can also apply for their mini-degree scholarship programs just like i did.

Catch you later!