What is A/B Testing?
The best web businesses out there are running tests, all day every day. It’s simply the process of trying out changes to the design, copy or paths of a page to improve on an agreed goal. We love testing things at Search Scientist…
An alternate version of the page is created, with a variation. A percentage of the traffic to the original page (usually 50%) is then sent to the variation. The original page remains the same, and is used to measure the experiment.
A/B testing involves only one variation to the page, but multivariate testing involves multiple variations within the same page. Multivariate tends to be suited to more advanced projects.
A/B Testing with Search Scientist
We use Optimizely and Google Analytics to understand which changes have worked, and which haven’t. With the statistics we’ve gathered, we can confidently pass on any changes to our clients’ web designer or developer.
Many E-commerce websites use A/B testing to maximise sales, but it can also be used to improve things like customer retention or email signups. Anything that can be defined as a site goal can be optimised by testing. Areas of improvement can usually be identified within 30 days, but this can depend on the traffic of the page being tested.
As well as testing website changes, Search Scientist constantly run experiments on the AdWords campaigns managed. For example, we test how results compare with variations on ad messaging, audiences targeted and the landing page the user is brought to.