Mistakes to Avoid When Running A/B Testing For Your Website
Table of Contents
With the increasing online competition, you have to give your target clients the best experience with your website to stay on top of the competition. Giving them the best user experience builds trust, increases brand engagement, and conversions. The best way to improve the experience is to run ab testing for your website.
What are A/B tests
To start with ab testing is running two different variations of your website pages to see if one works best for your audience. There are different things you can test on your website as you grow your brand
Many brands are running ab tests to improve their user experience as they grow their brand. Research shows that the ab testing market will be worthy $1081 by 2025
But you may ask why to bother with running a/b tests for my website. Well, here are some benefits that come with the A/B testing.
Why you need to run A/B testing for your brand
Make more sales
You want your brand to increase engagement, build trust with target clients, and get them to buy your products or services. Here is where A/B testing comes in.
To build more trust with your target audience you have to improve your user experience and give them what they want. That’s why you need to test different variations of your website.
You will be able to know what to improve as you engage your target clients, nurture them, and convert them into customers.
Increases customer engagement
The first important thing to customer engagement is to know your customers and understand where they are coming from.
Know their pains and position yourself in a place to solve them. Running A/B tests helps you learn more about your customers and how you can provide solutions to their challenges.
Customers are the center of your business. Engaging them in the right way builds more trust with your brand. They are more likely to do business with you.
Gives a better customer experience
Customers do business with brands that give them the best experience. Research shows that customers pay more for a better experience.
Doing tests helps give your customers the experience they want with your brand. You know how to satisfy them and make them your loyal retainer customers.
Reduce cart abandonment
There are different reasons customers abandon carts in their purchase process. Running A/B tests can help you reduce the abandonment rate on your cart and increase sales.
You know what they need and offer it to them. For example, you could compare PayPal and credit cards as payment options for your products or services. If they prefer PayPal to credit cards, then you can use it to reduce the abandonment rates.
Increases conversions and sales
A/B testing is a great way to help increase conversions for your brand. For instance, your business could be losing clients to your competitors because they find it hard to navigate landing your pages.
Running two versions of your landing page can help know which page converts and use it to increase your conversions and sales.
Working on your website page speed with the help of A/B testing can increase your conversions. Target customers hate sites that have low loading speed.
Generate more leads
Testing different aspects of your website help increase you generate more leads for your brand. For example, you can run tests on the content you produce, their fond color, type, and size.
Through the ab testing, you can know which type of content engaging your leads and optimize them. You can also do a test of increasing your landing pages and create a long sales copy for each page to see how your leads engage with your brand.
Avoid these A/B testing mistakes
These mistakes will have a huge effect on your business, try to avoid them as you run your ab tests.
Ending the tests in a short time
Many marketers start their tests and end them in a short time. Once they see the first few results they stop the testing. Running ab tests in a short time will not give you the best results that you need.
Once you start your ab testing, let the test run for some time as you evaluate what works best for your customers.
Change of test parameters
Before you start your ab testing, you have a specific goal that you want to achieve. The parameters that you set before you start the experiments help you achieve that goal.
Changing the parameter in the process of running the tests will affect the results you will get. Stick to the parameters you set for the entire testing process for better results.
Setting high expectations
Many marketers are searching for the best ways to increase their conversions and sales. They set up very high expectations from their ab testing strategy.
You can be discouraged after the tests if you don’t reach those expectations. This can affect all the other ab tests you wanted to run or stop the whole process altogether. Set expectations that are within margins you can achieve with your ab testing strategies.
No data collections
The customer data helps you know what’s working or not. With the data, you can easily fix what’s not working for your brand to increase engagement, conversion, and sales.
Running tests without a better way to collect useful data and insights that will help improve your business is a great mistake.
Too many tests at once
Many brands try to test everything at once. Don’t get me wrong you need to test everything on your website, but not at the same time.
Testing everything at the same time is costly and also affects the data you collect which will help you improve your brand.
Gathering data and insights takes time. Running different a/b tests will affect the data analyzing and measuring. For better results run one time at a time, collect all the data, and use it to fix and improve your user experience. Once you are done with a particular ab test, you can start running tests for another.
Not optimizing your a/b testing
You are running the tests to see what works best for your customers. To reach many target customers you have to optimize your tests. Many target customers are now using smartphones to search for information.
If your tests are not optimized for mobile, you miss the chance to reach those target clients.
Also in addition to optimizing your tests, ensure you send a lot of traffic to these tests. This will increase the number of people who see the tests and help you in your data collection and implementation.
Using too many variables per test
Your main goal of running a/b testing is to see what works best for your users. To get the best results it is recommended to use two variables per test.
Using many can confuse your audience and affect the data you collect. Here is an example of different variables and how they affect the traffic in your a/b testing process.
Not testing everything on your website
Running tests on some elements of your website is a great mistake many marketers make. Different aspects affect the way your target clients interact with your website.
Many factors affect conversions on your website. Your only best way is to run an a/b test for these factors.
Making assumptions on how your users interact with your brand, build trust, and convert can affect your brand growth.
Trusting results from other marketers
Many brands are now doing a/b testing on their sites. The results generated are not the same for different sites. Don’t trust the results you see other marketers have gotten from their tests.
For example, a certain site runs a test for their CTA buttons. They changed their button color and saw a 30% increase in conversions.
Implementing the same procedure wouldn’t guarantee that you will get the same results. Run your own tests and implement what you get to help you grow your business conversions and sales.
Starting your tests without hypothesis
You start your a/b testing with a goal you want to achieve after the testing experiments. Hypothesis helps guide you through your whole process of testing so that you can achieve that goal.
You don’t run your tests blindly and this helps you get better results in your a/b testing experiments. You generate the right data you can use to grow your brand and reach more customers and increase sales.
Not segmenting your traffic
You have both new visitors and returning visitors to your website. Before you run your tests you have to segment them.
Your traffic also uses different devices to access your website and are from different places. They also interact with your website in different ways.
Running a/b tests based on segmented traffic helps you know what’s working from the different perspectives of your traffic and what you can use to grow your business.
Running tests on micro-conversions
Don’t make the mistake of testing your micro-conversions for your website. Focus on the main goal of your a/b testing. You need to focus on the end goal as you don’t know how the smaller conversions affect your end goal.
Like for example, if you are running a SaaS business you want your target customers to take action on your website. It is important to focus on the signups for your free trial than on click-through to the free trial page.
However, improving the micro-conversions is essential as you increase the number of visitors who reach your sign-up page.
Conclusions
Customers love brands that give them the best experience as they solve their pain points. Running ab testing experiments will help you give your customers the experience they deserve. However, making the above mistakes can cost your business and affect its growth.
