Budget A/B Testing
Date: July 18, 2014Category: Author: David Hall
Are you looking to A/B test your site?
A/B testing has become quite the rave these days. Technology that was once only affordable to large website companies has, like most things internet, trickled down to the little guys and now everybody wants to try it out. Buzzwords like A/B testing, multivariate testing, and split testing fly around the web at light speed, and if your internet or SEO company is recommending A/B testing you may want to research it yourself a little before getting started. You may be able to do it yourself for free!
So what is A/B testing?
Wikipedia defines it as:
In marketing and business intelligence, A/B testing is jargon for a randomized experiment with two variants, A and B, which are the control and treatment in the controlled experiment. It is a form of statistical hypothesis testing with two variants leading to the technical term, binary hypothesis testing, used in the field of statistics.
Translated:
You take two or more versions of your web page and serve them up to visitors in an alternating fashion. Through analytics we then track how often each version of a page accomplishes the result we are looking for. Over a period of time we would typically then decide to serve up the page that converts the best to all our visitors.
Some key considerations
Does your site page have a legitimate “call to action” that you want to test? If your page is simply there to provide information to visitors without any expected behavior then you can’t really A/B test. Clear goals for your web page are a requirement for effective A/B testing.
Does your page get enough traffic to accurately measure conversions? If your site gets 10 visitors a day and you split them up over 2 or 5 different page versions it may take a few years before you can accurately see which page is performing better. Just because A/B testing has become easy and inexpensive to implement doesn’t mean that acting on insufficient data won’t cost you later. There are several tools and studies out there that will help you assess your traffic and conversion needs before A/B testing.
So you’ve decided it’s a good idea…now what?
A/B testing tools have come a long way in the past 1000 years and while the technology to serve up A/B pages is rather complex, several companies have done most of the work for you (for a fee of course). A quick Google search will show you scores of premium A/B testing services and I encourage you to shop around as most of them offer the same features at a wide variety of pricing.
Since the premium services are more than happy to tell you about themselves (Optimizely emails me 3 times a day), I thought I would focus on a few free services.
When you want free internet tools web folks usually look to Google and WordPress first, and when it comes to A/B testing their instincts will serve them well.
Google Website Optimizer has been retired but most of it’s best features have been moved into google analytics. Google Content Experiments can be a little complex to set up, but the google tutorials are solid and you can check them out here.
Google Website Optimizer can be set up on any site if you know a little bit about coding. If you have a wordpress site it is made even easier by this great plugin and wordpress users have even more free and easily configured options. I can solidly recommend Max A/B which is a stand alone solution that does not require Google analytics to do traffic recording. If you want to work through analytics then SES theme split test may be the way you want to go.
As you can see, while A/B/split/multivariate testing used to be very complex to implement, it is now possible to begin optimizing your webpages without spending any money. The only thing required is your time, which I hope this article may have saved you some of.
Well good luck in your A/B testing and if you have any ideas, questions or know of any other great free testing solutions be sure and leave me a comment.