Preparing For An A/b Test? Check Out These 3 Key Areas It is rightly said that “Look before you leap” if you want to avoid the severe consequences later on. This gains much more significance when it comes to the business scenario where even a single mistake can cost you heavily in terms of conversion rates, sales and customer engagement. You can't take chances in a business where your reputation, brand identity and revenues are at stake as it can be critical for your long term business goals. Keeping all these concerns in mind, A/B testing seems to be the befitting reply to all the above problems for improving the fortunes of your online business. However, if you want to make the maximum out of your A/B testing experiments, you need to be aware about the various checkpoints that can be speed breakers in the smooth journey towards a promising site. You need to take a quick look below for those A/B testing challenges: What is the appropriate time to call off your A/B tests? A/B testing is a completely different web testing approach and does not fall under the category of “instant coffee results”. You need to wait for the scheduled time interval before implementing the changes finally onto your site. Don't rush into things just as you have witnessed a significant surge in your conversion rates. This is because there may be high probability that the behavior and mood of the customers may not be same every day and it could affect your sales directly. In order to save yourself from the harmful effects of a hasty business decision, you need to run your A/B tests for a significant amount of time. By the careful analysis of your conversion rates for a significant amount of time, you can get a fair idea about the success or failure of your A/B testing experiments. Remember, patience is the ultimate key and you need to observe the behavior of your customers for a considerable amount of time for avoiding any regret regarding your business decisions. Are you having expertise of running your tests with less traffic? Getting a sizable amount of traffic is the wish of every business entity but there is no guarantee that it will also be fulfilled due to the changing business scenario and customer expectations. If you want to run any analytic test on your site, it is important that it is visited by a considerable amount of time. The above requirement do makes a lot of sense as it is important to have an adequate traffic before getting feedback and recommendations from your targeted customers. You need to introspect first if your site is getting the appropriate traffic to begin split testing experiments or not. Don't get into the temptation of starting A/B tests if you are not getting optimum traffic on your site. In these scenarios, it would be much better to
perform a qualitative research in the form of surveys through various tools like Survey Monkey, Google Forms, Survey Gizmo and such others. How can you decide the conversion rates achieved are superb for your site? There are no strict definitions that can define which is the permissible value for the conversion rates and when are the A/B tests ready to be implemented on your site. This is one of the most tricky question during A/B testing experiments and is often left unanswered most of the times. Although, there is no threshold limit for an appropriate conversion rates but you need to wait for a statistical significance or confidence level of at least 95%. It is the minimum threshold limit that paves the way for the final implementation of the changes of an A/B testing experiment on a site. Don't ignore this but wait for the confidence level of 95% or more for that final “shot in the arm� during the implementation of changes. In the end... No doubt, A/B testing is not a recent phenomenon and has been in practice by numerous online businesses for quite a long time. However, if you want to make the most with your split testing experiments, it is important to have honest answers for these critical questions. Remember, it is all a matter of hits and misses when it comes to the matter of A/B testing, so don't chances with your time, money and efforts. Keep a track on these areas and you will never be disappointed with your results.