How to Split Test Your Website and Achieve Best Conversions? While designing your web pages you have two choices, either you can implement a design which you think is best or you can just split test your design ideas before implementing it to find out which variation gives better conversions. Yes, Split testing or simply call it A/B testing is one of the best ways to increase your conversion rates by achieving strong confidence about the changes you want to accomplish with your website.
Here I will be discussing the ways you can adopt to achieve a seamless split testing for your website. 1. Choose and isolate the variable for test-
Here, one thing that I would like to add is that you have two options for selecting the variables or elements . One is through A/B testing where you select single page entities and test it against an individual variation while another option is by using Multivariate testing where you test multiple variations against the manifold combinations of those variations. For the time being, I will be discussing A/B testing or Split testing only. To get started, you have to choose any individual entity you would like to test. For example, you can choose anything from the font color, font type, font size, location of the CTA buttons, the design of CTA buttons, statements on CTA buttons, etc. There are numerous variables you can select from your site to be A/B tested. 2. Execute the variationsAfter you select the variable to test, your next job is to perform the desired changes on it. Create different adaptations of the variables that will be tested against each other. You should remember that you are applying the A/B testing strategy so, you need to apply only one single variation for each variation otherwise, you might get confused about the testing results. For example, if you want to check the performance of the CTA button "Buy Now," then you should create another version of your CTA button on the same page. Say, you replace the text to "Grab it." You can utilize various A/B testing tools to make the job of testing variations much easy. I would recommend Mocking Fish A/B Testing tool as it provides a GUI interface where you can apply your desired changes seamlessly by just using the drag and drop feature. Please note: The original web page which you have selected for the test is called as “Control page� while the page with desired changes is termed as “ Variation page". 3. Tell Google that you are doing A/B testOnce your changes are ready, it's imperative that you inform Google that you are performing an A/B test on your site. You can utilize Google's Content Experiments software for deploying your test cases as it also helps to inform Google that you are testing your web pages. This platform is a free of cost service from Google which can test five pages against each other. In case of a need for more pages to test, you can use Mocking Fish A/B Testing tool or any other testing tool available in the market. Here, you should specify how much traffic you want to divert on each variation. However, it's recommended that you divide the traffic to 50:50 ratio so that you get an unambiguous and unbiased
result for each variation. 4. Measure the performance of each variationAfter successfully deploying the test pages, the next job is to measure the effect of each variation in the form of the conversion rates given by them individually. Utilize Google Analytics tools for the performance check on Google search engine or you can use other A/B testing tools which can give you detailed testing results and a permissible confidence level.
The adaptation which gives more conversion rate is termed as the “Winner page� and it is the one which you need to select for final implementation on your site. For a continuous improvement of the conversion rates, it is important that you perform a split testing whenever the conditions allow.