Points to ponder while doing an A/B Testing

Points to Ponder While Doing an A/B Testing A/B testing is a great tool for analyzing and testing your website’s performance based on the opinion of your customers regarding various changes and modifications on your site. It is the most simple web testing method that can optimize the performance of your website to grab optimum business results. It is also known as Split testing as it is based on the variation of the same page that are created and tested against each other to find out which web page version best suits your business requirements.

You need to remember certain points while performing an A/B testing or Split Testing for your website. According to the guidelines and instructions of the various search engines and Google Webmaster, it is important to follow certain crucial points that can make a tremendous impact on your A/B testing efforts.

1. Avoid the use of cloaking technique for your website content Some testing professionals play with the instruction of the search engines as they try to fool them by providing the different versions of their site to Google-bot and humans respectively. It means that site owners serve a page to the bots which is completely different from the page they serve to the site user for the same URL. This is called as Cloaking and it is strictly against the guidelines of the webmasters for avoiding search engine penalty on your site. Doing so will degrade your online ranking on Google search results which will in turn affect your conversion rates and sales.

2. Use of 302s redirects instead of 301s While running an A/B test, we direct some user from original URL to a variation URL for analyzing the performance of two web pages. Just remember that it is important

while directing the user to a different URL, we are using 302 redirect which is a temporary redirect rather than using a 301 redirect as it is a permanent redirection.

This will help the search engines to distinguish between the two web pages during the testing phase and will avoid the indexing of temporary redirect page. Further, using a permanent redirect instructs the search engines to replace the old index of your page with the new index.

3. Do not run the testing phase for an extended time Always remember that while performing an A/B testing, it would be a wise idea to run the tests for a shorter span of time. The longer duration tests makes it difficult for the site owners to implement the desired changes on their site within a scheduled time frame which could affect their chances of growth and conversions. Once a test is completed, you should immediately apply the desired changes on your site based on the success and confidence level achieved by your A/B tests.

4. Make appropriate division of your site traffic You can split the traffic of the web pages in any desired ratio but it is recommended to keep the ratio as 50:50 as it will give an unbiased result for your eCommerce store.

Splitting the test pages in equal proportion ensures that each web page version gets the same amount of traffic and growth opportunities.

5. Don’t try out multiple things at a time You need to check each component separately in different time slots for getting a fair idea about the usability of your different site elements. By doing so, you can get an unambiguous idea about the performance of each element independently.

Implementation of all the test cases in same time slot creates a confusing condition for the visitor when he/she finds different versions of pages with the same URL. It reduces the level of trust and reliability regarding your site in the mind of customers.

Thus, the above guidelines give a brief idea about the important considerations you should take while performing an A/B testing for your website. Adopting the above mentioned guidelines will help you to get a converting website in terms of conversion rates, sales and customer engagement.