5 Ingredients to Spice up Your A/B Testing

Whether you’re new to optimization or a seasoned veteran, you need to craft a robust recipe book of A/B test ideas. Sometimes you can get stuck cooking up the same old A/B tests that don’t yield meaningful results. When that happens, it’s best to take a step back. Here are five ingredients that will spice your A/B testing recipes:

1.) Analytics. Use data-driven findings to plan new A/B tests. Analytics data can provide insight into customer behavior and help clarify the most effective ways to reach and engage your target audience. Consider these primary metrics:

• primary traffic referral sources
• pages with high exit rates
• segments of traffic more or less likely to convert

2.) Previous campaign results. Revisiting results of previous campaigns helps you remove redundant ideas from your list on a tactical, one-off level. It also helps you look at the big picture, giving you insight on where your A/B testing was and what its trajectory looks like. A key benefit of using a A/B testing solution is that it allows you to keep track of every campaign, regardless of whether it was successful. This lets you identify trends and focus on attributes of successful campaigns. Optimization opportunities can be found in both winning and losing campaigns; even campaigns that didn’t quite produce the results you were expecting can provide direction for follow-up campaigns. Consider running a multivariate testing campaign to identify areas of your site which have the potential to move the needle and conduct follow-up campaigns to identify the best combination of changes to make to these areas. Keep track of all of your campaigns so that you can measure your optimization trajectory and find attributes of successful campaigns.

3.) Best practices. Engage with other practitioners. We recently published “30 Awesome Online Groups You Should Join for Effective CRO” for marketing practitioners to join. These groups include peers and gurus who share A/B test ideas that work. Engaging with outside experts who don’t have a vested interest in your company and its products provides you with an objective view. They not only offer fresh perspectives, but they can aggregate strategies from hundreds of companies. You can browse our collection of webinars, case studies, ebooks, etc. by heading over to our library. Or check out our knowledge base articles to learn how SiteSpect works.

4.) Surveys, focus groups, and Voice of Customer (VoC). These tools offer a great way to pre-test an experiment to gauge its viability. The feedback you gather from potential buyers via services like UserTesting, Qualtrix or Verint enable organizations to target different groups of customers and gather important insight that can provide direction for A/B tests.

5.) Attend Events. With COVID-19 restrictions lifting, conferences are now offering live, in-person events. Examples include Digital Summit, DigiMarCon, and Shoptalk. Grow your network by meeting other marketers and visiting exhibitors to learn about products to help you. It’s always helpful to learn how those in this industry develop A/B testing ideas.

In addition to all of these great ingredients, don’t forget about intuition. Ultimately, your goal should be to A/B test as many ideas as possible and to learn from each campaign. From there, share the results with internal stakeholders. Let them see those successes!

Have another ingredient you think should be added to this list? Send us an email: marketing@sitespect.com.

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