Upgrade your ab testing strategy with a heat map tool

Upgrade Your A/B Testing Strategy With a Heat Map Tool

It's really frustrating when you design a variation for your website, landing page, or any element and the only thing you find is either there is no difference between the conversion rates or the variation’s rate is even than the original. Unfortunately, it just causes a sense of vein or a waste of time.

Website owners perform the A/B testing to find the best design options to improve UX for a better conversion rate. However, the only thing that comes out is your whole campaign was just a waste of time and efforts, and you are now confused like never before. If this is the case, you don't need to be disheartened at all. Read below to find out how can you carry a successful A/B testing campaign that would not be a waste of anything. Instead, you might end up finding some hidden truth about your website.

If conversion rate of Variation is less than the original

Don’t be dishearten at all. Let’s say your website was experiencing an average conversion rate.

So, you decided to uprise the current rate by performing a modification which you thought

would be best and gain some better conversion. Later, you found out that the variation was a failure; conversion rate is even lesser on it.

Stop! That’s not a failure. In fact, that’s a success. Don’t you consider the case when you would have implemented the modification without A/B testing it? At least you are now aware that this particular combination of modifications is not good for your website and its conversion rate. Without A/B testing, you would have never known why the conversion rates are experiencing downfall all of a sudden.

So, none of your A/B testings is a failure. It's a new learning for your CRO knowledgebase.

What to do next?

Though none of your A/B tests is a failure, practically, in a competitive business environment, you cannot afford to waste your time and opportunities in a series trail and errors. The A/B testing would show you the variation which outperformed, but cannot tell you why it outperformed the original. For this, you would need a data that is more of a visual, rather than a chart or a table of figures.

The kind of visual representation of data that I am talking about can be obtained by utilizing a heatmap tool. When your A/B testing tool would present you a data about which element outperformed, the heatmap tool would tell you why it outperformed. Unlike A/B testing, heatmaps give you the instant access to know the usability of different site elements. From pages, CTA button, checkout forms to email campaigns, a large number of site elements can be exposed to a heatmap tool for gaining an insight of their performance on your site. The heatmap tools reveal how your visitors are interacting at different locations on the site and this would provide you an opportunity to modify the elements according to the visitors’ browsing behavior and expectations. Let’s see how.

What Click heatmaps have to say about your A/B testing ?

Why the variation had a lesser conversion rate than the original? Did the click activity be different in both? Did the visitors not pay an attention to the part below the fold?

When you attach a heatmap tool before and after your A/B testing campaign, you notice a difference in the results plus a new entry for your CRO knowledgebase.

Before A/B testing

Before testing, use a heatmap tool to find out the current scenario of your website’s usability.

Utilize the Click heatmaps to find out which are the parts that are being clicked by most of the users and which are not. By doing so, you will get an idea about which elements need to be kept as it is, and which require some modification. Collect the insight about the outperforming elements and utilize them to perform the suitable modifications of design, color, font, or placement in your A/B testing campaign.

Utilize the data to find out the parts that get considerable attention but are not so important from conversion point of view; they might be causing distraction to the actually important parts. Replace the outperforming yet important elements with the performing yet not so important elements. There are uncountable ideas for suitable modification and create a

variation for your A/B testing campaign.

Similarly, you can get enormous ideas for your new variation page by utilizing a Scroll heatmap that will tell you about how far the visitors scroll on your webpages and how long they stick to a particular fold on the webpage. You can utilize the Scrollmap data to modify or re-allocate the placement of elements on different folds of the webpage.

TIP: It’s advised that you perform the A/B testing of outperforming elements first in a separate A/B testing campaign otherwise, you might get confused with the false positives of the already performing elements.

After A/B testing

After A/B testing, compare the Clickmap and Scroll heat map data between your variation and

original page to find out how visitors’ interaction were different on both the versions. Find out which page or which part of the pages were able to gain the maximum attention, and kept the visitors engaged. The special cases may arise when you have a long and heavy webpage. Here, the combination of clickmaps and scrollmaps can tell you a lot about the user engagement.

To conclude Heatmaps provide an extra wing to your whole A/B testing campaign; before and after testing.

The MockingFish tool can be good option in this regard. It is a free A/B testing tool that comes bundled with a free heatmap tool. Combine the two tools to get a better A/B testing result without any need for a trial and error.