Imagine when playing a game of soccer, but the goalpost keeps moving. No matter how skilled the team players are, it’s impossible to score a single goal. This example applies to digital marketing too.
Doing A/B testing in your digital marketing blog without knowing what to split test is like playing soccer without a defined goal post. Your SEO skills might be impressive in capturing traffic, but you have to nail it right in conversions.
A/B testing is the holy grail of conversion rate optimization for digital marketers.
How else would you know that a red CTA button is outperforming your green CTA buttons unless you split test?
How would you know that your flashy landing page indeed does suck and you need to change it?
In A/B testing, you are comparing one element of your website with a variant. You will, therefore, first have a hypothesis that you want to prove or disapprove. You will need to statistically collect data, analyze it and make interpretations from the test done.
How statistics can help your digital marketing efforts before A/B testing
But for A/B testing to be implemented and to work, you will need first to know what needs to be split tested.
It would end up as disastrous if you tried to change everything on your site at once. Numbers never lie, and they need to guide you before you arrive at the variants that need to be A/B tested.
1. Bounce rate and user behavior
With the advent of big data analytics tools such as Google Analytics, gathering data has never been easier. With Google Analytics, for example, you can tell the bounce rates and dwell times of visitors to your key pages.
Google Analytics can also tell you what pages are bringing in the most traffic to your website. At the same time, the tool tells you how your users behave when they visit your site, where they are clicking, and at what point they are exiting.
With these data, you can tell what needs to be split tested. It could be that your SEO titles are over-promising while your content sucks.
It could be that your introductions lack a halo effect and fail to captivate your visitors to stay. It could also be that your pages are full of text without any images or videos that would get your audience staying for long.
It is time to split test all these variants and mark out those that brought in an improvement to your pages so that you could retain them.
Case studies
Digiseg has improved their conversion rates and dwell time for users by first going through their Google Analytics data and coming with areas to improve on.
2. Current conversion rates
All digital businesses want a conversion. It could be a signup, a filling of a survey form, or a sale. With your current conversion rate data, you will know what pages are calling out for improvements.
Once you split test them, you can then tell from the new conversion rates whether what you did moved your conversion needle or was a complete flop.
Case studies
Drafkings.com has dramatically improved their CRO by the first split testing their past conversion rates and knowing where to improve.
3. Number of sessions per user
Google Analytics can tell you the number of sessions that an average user on your site takes. It can also tell you how visitors to a sales page can arrive there from other informative pages on your site. With this data, you can split test and increase the number of sessions that you are receiving and refer more users to your converting sales pages.
Case studies
Frosmo shows how the use of AI can help you increase the number of sessions per user. AI can learn what the user wants and therefore serve them content that they are interested in.
4. Average time on page by a user
Data analytics tools can tell you the average time that a user spends on your site. With this data, you will know what content needs to be improved or which pages need multimedia content to better the user experience on your site.
With such a data metric, the webmaster can formulate a hypothesis on the various elements on their web page. And split test them to emerge with the overall winner who nets them the best user experience and a better time spent on-site by visitors.
5. Places on-site getting the most clicks
When you are using heatmaps on your digital marketing website, you will see places where visitors are clicking on most. With this metric, you will know where to position your text, images, or call-to-action buttons.
With these statistics, you will split test and see what brings out the best user experience when you place your content in such highly clicked positions.
Case studies
UXplanet has written an extensive report on how they have improved the CRO of Oddschecker by using heatmaps to know where to place their CTAs.
6. Number of people clicking on CTAs but not buying
In an e-commerce platform, you will find customers who read your sales pages, go ahead to click your CTAs but end up not adding items to the cart. It could be that the products you are promoting are too expensive and so they end up finding alternatives.
It could also be that your sales funnel pages lack social proofing that you could enhance with reviews and endorsements by key media personality images on your BOFU content.
To know what to work on, you will, of course, need to split test all these elements so that you can finally arrive at the best practices that are going to increase your sales.
Case studies
Social proof and promoting brands that customers know about will help improve your conversion rate optimization.
Wrap up on statistics to look into before A/B testing your digital marketing efforts
A/B testing is a vital aspect that every digital marketer worth their salt needs to know. It informs you on what data to work with to improve your sales and conversions.
With A/B testing, one can make informed decisions without guesswork and they can replicate that success sitewide.
Big data analytic tools play a crucial role in formulating your hypothesis before statistically split testing your marketing efforts and finding what the winner is. Once you have the right statistics to split-test, you will no longer be groping in the dark wondering what aspects to improve in your business.
You will also be able to know what really moves the needle as far as success in your digital marketing is concerned.
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