You’re Not Seeing What’s Not Working on Your Website

You can’t know it without A/B testing

Tada
Shopify Society
4 min readMar 9, 2022

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Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

What is A/B testing?

Intuition can help you make business decisions, but research methodologies like A/B testing are what you need for conversions and user behavior. If you don’t test, you might never know what is and isn’t working for your users. A/B testing is a process of testing the original website design named ‘control’ through another version called ‘variation.’ This ‘variation’ design has one or more landing page elements altered in placement, function, or structure compared to ‘control.’ Here, we try to understand how A/B testing can turn your eCommerce business around!

The elements that might need testing

You can utilize A/B testing to optimize different elements like:

  • Page layout and length
  • Headlines and subheadlines
  • Forms
  • CTAs
  • Website navigation
  • Media (video, gif, infographic)

Let’s look at how changing some elements can impact your website:

Headline

It takes a visitor less than 100 milliseconds to decide if they have understood what your website is about and if they want to trust it or not. The headline is among the first elements the visitors will notice on your landing page. It is your chance to express your value proposition and appeal to different visitor personas.

CTAs

Call to Action words work as catalysts to help people claim a discount, subscribe to emails, or make a purchase within the next 5 minutes to avail an offer, etc. While every CTA might not work, you will at least know the ones that have clicked with the customers through A/b testing!

Website Navigation

Your idea of easy website navigation might be different from that of your visitors. Your present web navigation might be one of the reasons your visitors lose the patience to place an order and exit the website. Exposing your website to real users can give you the right idea.

Media

In most cases, well-produced videos outperform images in improving conversions. The video or images impact on conversion differs from one industry to the next.

How to test the use of images and videos on your website?

  • The user of product videos vs images
  • Length of video
  • The type of videos used (like a product demonstration, customer reviews, features, etc.)

Why Data-Driven Decisions are important, and how A/B testing does it?

Today, it’s rare not to hear about data-driven decision-making. The term alone has recently become a buzzword in business, and for a very good reason. Data allows business owners to control the endless digital insights that are now available at their fingertips and clinch the power of data-driven business intelligence to make better-informed decisions for business growth and evolution, thus increasing profits. By understanding how to measure and analyze your data accurately by using the right reporting tools, you will find it easier to perform data-driven decision-making that can help your business thrive.

1. Ease of operations and maximum efficiency

A/B tests improve operational efficiency. Supported by data, the right decision can even become apparent after a week of recorded outcomes. Testing, rather than guessing, can yield valuable time for marketing teams, creative teams, and operational associates to work on further priorities.

2. Lowered cost and channelized investment

The financial and opportunity cost of taking the incorrect decision can be minimized through A/B testing, not to mention the learning gained during the test can prove to be invaluable. If you are testing a blue button against a yellow button, split evenly among your audience, and testing shows that the button should definitely be blue, the risk of exposing the less effective experience is cut by half!

3. Guiding point for marketing plans

Quite a lot of the most innovative companies in the world count on A/B tests for marketing and product decisions. Experimentation is so integral to some businesses that they develop customized tools for their testing needs. Production releases don’t happen at LinkedIn without split testing. Netflix is notorious for running experiments on their sign-up process and content effectiveness, and they encourage their designers to think like scientists. Google conducted 17,523 live traffic experiments, resulting in 3,620 launches in 2019. Jeff Bezos famously said, “Our success is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.”

4. Shows possible problems and avoidable mistakes

Data-driven decisions have an objective approach and the parameters they rely upon are objective, making the calculations much easier and straightforward. When you are presented with the problems a particular element might be causing, you will take the opportunity and avoid it. When this is done frequently, your website could have a huge turn around!

In a Nutshell

A/B testing lets you test value proposals on real web users within the context of their concrete interactions with your site. You will gather quantifiable data on which types of messaging resonate and the ones that fall flat. There is nothing like A/B testing with thousands or millions of visitors to get to the bottom of what messaging works to increase sales.

Trident AB offers you the flexibility to control what elements you want to test, which users you want to target, and how many variants you decide to include. You can witness the impact these changes have on your most important business metrics, like revenue and engagement, and whether or not they are statistically significant. Once you find the version that converts best, you can implement them widely with just one click!

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Tada
Shopify Society

A journey of business growth and conversion begins at Tada. Engage, interact, and convert your Shopify visitors into recurring customers.