A/B testing

Testing your landing pages

When you know your target group, have a design following the tips and standards and it should work in theory. However, sometimes landing pages don’t work even though all rules are followed. That is why landing pages need to be tested and they constantly need to be improved. If you are testing your landing pages the right way this can give insights into what should be improved, or at least changed. A way that is adopted by marketers and website owners is a method called A/B testing.

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What is A/B Testing

With A/B testing the visitor is basically given the choice between version A and version B. The visitor won’t know this, but it can be seen like that. The visitors are unknowingly for example because of different email versions, send to 2 different layouts. The visitor browses just like at a normal landing page, but in the background, analytics are being made. This test usually takes a while to retrieve enough results to analyse and create a conclusion. In those conclusions, the company can see which of the landing page versions works the best and brought in the most sales. That one will be used and a new version will be built with the knowledge of that landing page. (Unbounce, n.a.)

With A/B testing you can test multiple different layouts. For example, when you have changed the call to action text three times, you can test which of the three works best by doing A/B tests. Dividing all traffic that comes to your websites evenly over the versions.

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A/B Testing Tips

Hubspot, Unbounce and Kissmetrics some of the biggest players in marketing, sales, CRM and Testing gave tips on where to think about when A/B testing. Some of the most important ones for you to know are written below. 

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● One at the time

Only perform 1 test at the time. So when you’re doing A/B tests of multiple landing pages, don’t test a new email layout as well. This can make the results untrustworthy. Also, test the different versions at the same time, otherwise the period in where the test happened can influence the results.

● Sample Group

Make sure you split your sample group randomly, don’t let any filtering happen. This will make sure you have a randomly generated audience.

● Traffic Percentage

Decide how much of the traffic should go to each version. If you have a current landing page version, that is receiving more traffic from different sources you could give version B more traffic percentage to even it out (Version A 40%, version B 60% for example). Then this would even out the results. This depends on what traffic you are receiving from where. With a new and old version, this would be 50/50.

● Duration

The duration of the tests should always be long enough to receive trustworthy results. A rule that is created to do this is by running the test for at least 1 week. In this way, you receive data results for a whole week. Which gives you a good insight into how people from every period of the week react on the landing pages. Also run the tests as long that there are at least 100 unique visitors. In this way, there is a reasonable audience. Next to that run the test until results are for 95% stable. Otherwise, no conclusions can be drawn from the outcomes.

● Google Indexation

When testing 2 landing pages you don’t want Google to start index your version B page instead of your version A page. Since this can harm your marketing strategy and may cost you sales. this can be done by always adding a “No Index” to the version B page. This will prevent keyword cannibalization and duplicate issues that can harm your position in Google. Next to that, when it’s the first time you’re testing a landing page, wait for google to have your landing page indexed. This can take a while. Wait until the analytics results are stable to start the test. Also, apply the Canonical reference from version A in the Version B head.

● Big & Small

You can test as small as, just the call to action tags. But you can also test big changes, like a completely new landing page. When starting with landing pages it is smart to have multiple page version. In this way, you can see which layout works best. Based on that you can refine the page and optimise it for your audience.

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