If you have not started using A/B testing with your e-commerce website, it might be time to start considering it. With A/B testing you can fine tune your website to maximize the conversion rates to increase your sales. Once you see how easy A/B testing is with Google’s Optimize, you will realize how the power of A/B and multivariate testing can help increase conversions and sales.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is when you preset two different versions of a web page to different users. This can be done in many different ways. You can do subtle color changes, or even complete layout changes. You can also do text changes as well. What you are looking for is one version that ends up in more conversions than the other page. Think of it this way, if you change the text on your “Add to Cart” button to “Buy Now” and it increases your conversions by 5% wouldn’t this be a change that you would want to know and implement permanently? Or if you changed your “Add to Cart” button from green to red and saw a 6% jump in conversions. This is what A/B testing is measuring.
Why test?
A/B testing is not at all about SEO. It is about maximizing your existing traffic. When you maximize your existing traffic by turning those customers into conversions, you make more money without actually spending more money. How would it help your business if your ads started preforming 50% better than they currently are? You might be more adpt to investing more in your ads and making even more money.
What all can you test?
Google Optimize is very flexible, you can test almost anything that might affect user conversion rates with it, including:
- Colors
- Fonts
- Text changes
- Layouts
- Images
- Links
- and so much more.
Some ideas for A/B testing your site
- Add to Cart button: You can change the color or the text on these buttons. You can also change the positioning of the buttons on your site, or the size of the button.
- Product image: You can test variations using different product images. You can also edit the raw html to change the grid and test out using larger or smaller product images on the page.
- Reviews: Does having the review stars high up on the page help with conversions? Or does it hurt? You can hide them and test to find out. Or try putting the actual testimonial up higher on the page to see if that increases conversions.
- Adding banners: You can add reassurance banners like “Free Shipping”, “Lowest price guarantee”, or one with your return policy to how they affect conversions.
- Better descriptions: Do better, longer short descriptions help with creating conversions? Test on a couple of products to see if it is worthwhile to add them to your whole catalog.
- Colors: Would using different contrasting colors on your product page help convert browsers to customers? Remember, certain colors can be used to invoke feelings, you can use this to your advantage.
The possibilities are almost endless for altering the pages of your site to test the conversion rates, they are only limited by your imagination. If you are still in doubt to whether A/B testing is actually useful, here is one of my favorite articles on the subject. How Obama raised $60 million by running a simple experiment The article goes over how the Obama campaign used A/B testing during his last presidential run to figure out what would make donors donate more money to his campaign. The article is very insightful with the changes they made and the results of each change that was made.
With thirty bees
Since version 3.14 our Google Analytics module with thirty bees comes ready to add your Google Optimize ID. All you have to do is sign into your Google Optimize account and add the Id to your site. You can find a complete tutorial on how to use Google Optimize with thirty bees here.
