4 Situations When You Need To Avoid A/B Testing
There are times when even the best practices may not offer you the desired results and the entire efforts may go waste within no time. This is a common scenario and happens with numerous site owners that are involved in various business domains. Inspite of adopting A/B testing practices, site owners are still struggling hard to get required conversion rates and sales. So, who actually stands as the culprit for this bad situation? Well, it is observed that while implementing big bang reforms through A/B testing, we often forgot minor things which ultimately leads to the failure of our entire testing efforts. No site owner would want his/her time and money go waste without providing any considerable business results. To stop this situation, take a look at certain scenarios where site owners need to avoid A/B testing immediately. Situation # 1
When you can’t wait to take business decisions- In a competitive business environment, it is important to take decisions at the right time for grabbing maximum conversions and sales. However, in situations like the arrival of a festive occasion, eCommerce site owners especially, need to run various campaigns for their targeted customers without wasting a
single moment. Here, they can’t wait to perform A/B testing on their offers regarding how to grab maximum conversions through them. This is because A/B testing experiments require a time period of at least 2-3 months to arrive at a reliable statistical significance. In this way, it would rob eCommerce store owners from grabbing higher sales during that special festive occasion. So, the ideal way is to avoid A/B testing and implement offers on your site instantly. Situation # 2
When you are not having adequate traffic- It is an ideal scenario to perform A/B testing on a site when the traffic count is optimal for ensuring better testing results. Although, A/B testing can be performed on low traffic sites but to have a better insight, it would be sane to implement testing on an adequate traffic site. Don’t waste your testing efforts, time and money on a low traffic site as the acceptable confidence level may take a long time to arrive. First, you need to take required steps to improve the traffic on your website and then implement the A/B testing experiments later on. For improving the traffic count on your site, you need to take a wide range of steps as mentioned below: - Track the visitor activity on your site through the help of heatmap tool for understanding the strong and weak areas of your website. - Improve the website design and navigation by making changes in the headlines, banners, home page, category pages and other website areas. - Provide enough reasons to your customers to make an online purchase through discount and promotions extensions by Knowband store. - Work towards minimizing the loading speed of your eCommerce site for better customer engagement and traffic.
Situation # 3
When you have selected the wrong hypothesis- The success or failure of an A/B testing experiment depends on the hypothesis selected for the test. You need to perform a detailed research before selecting any hypothesis for the web testing experiments. Have a clear understanding of your testing goals in order to select the right hypothesis. Your hypothesis can be any strategy which you think might work for your website like “change in the position of web form can bring more conversions”, “change in CTA text can ensure more sales” or other such statements. Don’t perform A/B testing till you are not sure about the merit of your hypothesis in order to avoid the disappointment later on. It would be a sheer wastage of time, money and testing efforts if you are performing tests without being sure about the selected hypothesis.
Situation # 4
When you have the urge to test multiple things at a time- It is rightly said that “small is not enough for everybody” same is the case with testing. There are numerous site owners who are not satisfied with some minor changes here and there through A/B testing. For all these site owners, Multi-variate testing seems to be the “new found love”. With this Multivariate testing, users can make multiple changes at a time by creating a new variation of an original web page for testing purposes. So, if you want to perform multiple changes on your site and measure the conversion potential among your selected sample traffic, it is time to pay attention towards multivariate testing without any second thought. Remember, A/B testing is meant to test one element at a time, so avoid it when you have multiple things to perform on your site. A better option, in this case would be to go for Multi-variate testing and not for A/B testing. Conclusion While performing web testing on your site, you need to remember that “one shoe size does not fit all”, so A/B testing can’t be the ultimate panacea. It is essential to analyze its pros and cons before implementing it on different situations. If you are not vigilant while performing A/B testing, it could also backfire for your online business. So, use testing with care for grabbing optimum business results.