A/B Testing Will Help You Make Better Decisions

As a digital business leader, it’s easy to look for guidance and insights that will move your businesses forward.

Even if your website converts and you make consistent sales revenue, it’s easy to feel like there’s a “next big thing” waiting around the corner.

But how do you know if that big sales driver will be meaningful for your business?

The truth is, you don’t. But that’s never a reason to avoid pushing your website forward with new, innovative ideas.

Optimizing For Your Unique Target Audience

The next time you plan to make a website update, you’ll probably look at what your competitors and favorite online sellers are already doing. There’s nothing wrong with using competitive research to drive decision making, but it’s important to remember that no target audience is exactly like yours.

The same goes for website “best practices”. While there are some obvious best practices (don’t hide your CTAs and make sure your website loads quickly), others sometimes land in a gray area.

A well-tested website that targets millennials will likely function differently than a site targeting boomers. Similarly, a website built for the gaming industry shouldn’t look like a website that sells life insurance.

That’s why it’s important to create a measurement strategy for any big website changes you make, even if they’re “sure wins”.

Have Peace Of Mind When You Make Updates

What’s the best way to know if your new idea is a winner or a loser? Many digital marketing leaders are tempted to implement a new, flashy site update and read the results once it’s live. The problem is many other things can get in the way of accurate performance analysis.

Unless you have two identical timeframes (the same amount of website traffic, conversion rates, promotions, etc.) with and without your new experience, you’ll find yourself comparing apples to oranges.

You can’t control the weather

Here’s an exaggerated example to add some color to this idea. Let’s say you own an online umbrella business and you’re launching a new checkout experience. You’ve decided to compare the first six weeks of the new checkout experience with the exact same six weeks last year. You believe both time periods are exactly the same except for that new checkout.

Once the new checkout has been live for six weeks, you run your analysis, and the new experience is showing a 10% increase in website conversions! You share the news with the company and call it a win.

Unfortunately, you begin to see poor website performance one month later. What you didn’t realize when you analyzed your checkout test was that the time period you compared from the previous year was in the middle of a drought. It didn’t rain for weeks.

So, your positive checkout performance was driven by rare weather conditions in the previous year. If the conditions had been truly equal, your new experience would have actually performed worse than the original experience.

How could you have mitigated this risk? Instead of comparing two separate (and very different) timeframes, you could have split your current website traffic into two equal groups: A control group that would see the old checkout experience and a test group that would see the new experience. Reading the test in this manner would have canceled out the weather variable.

Why Is A/B Testing So Important?

Website optimizations have the potential to significantly increase your site conversion rate, leading to more revenue and higher profits for your business… but only if you’re able to accurately measure their performance.

Ongoing testing roadmaps allow you to make sure you’re constantly driving incremental sales and learning more about your unique target audience at the same time.

If you’re making big optimization decisions based on competitors and skipping the analysis step, let’s set up a call to get your testing program started!