Why is A-B Testing Important

    

Here’s the thing, design is the second most important thing in the multi-billion dollar industry that is the Internet. Next to content, design is the most influential part of an online business. The problem however, is that folks allow their personal preconceptions of what works and what doesn’t influence their profit. Interested in how to solve this problem? It’s called A-B testing.

Unless you are creating a website based around a personal passion, every website in one way or another is trying to make money. You could be relying on ads for income, you could be selling a physical product or you could be promoting a service. Regardless of your content, your site exists to make money.

If you’ve graduated from the school of hard knocks online, you know how important “conversion rates” are and you know that when a design works, making small changes slowly is the best way to improve productivity. While new “interaction managers” and “user interface designers” often want to completely discard a design before quantifying what’s working, what’s not and why, the old pro’s know that they had better have a good reason for a complete redesign without a significant amount of preparation.

However, everyone has goals. If you live and die online, those goals revolve around money, clicks and conversions. In order to improve, one must make changes.

A-B testing is the solution. Basically, you hypothesize what is wrong with the design, change it and push an equal amount of identical traffic at both your old design and your new design.

How to Preform A/B Testing

1. Identify a layout change that you think will will have a positive increase in conversion.

2. Use the Google Website Optimizer Tool: http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

3. Google’s Website Optimizer works in the background to split up page A and page B and starts directing traffic evenly to your tests. Google is great at statistics and they don’t skimp with the Website Optimizer.

Here is an introduction to the Website Optimizer:

More Information

If you’re interested in seeing what other people are doing, check out this website:

http://www.abtests.com/

ABTests.com is somewhat of a gallery of A/B conversion tests. You can see what others have done and think about what needs to be done to your site to maximize conversions.

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Date Published: 18. Apr, 2010
Categories: Uncategorized
Number of views this week: 155