3 Steps For Effective A/B Split Testing

Regardless of your market or niche, A/B split testing provides information that guides your business along a more successful path. It’s one thing to have a hypothesis about something. It’s entirely another thing to prove it.

A/B split testing is the process of creating two versions of one thing that you want to test. For example, you may want to test a sales page, email open rates, a sign-up form, a lead magnet or something else.

You already have one version, but you think if you changed one thing about it you’d covert more. Now you can try it simply and easily using technology and software.  And, make no mistake, once you start split testing your audience will surprise you.

FREE Checklist: Business Systems & Automation

Why Is A/B Split Testing So Popular?

There are a lot of things that should be split tested, but to do proper split testing you need to know why, not just what. When you pay attention to the numbers, a lot of amazing things happen.

You’ll Get Better at Targeting Your Ideal Customer

When you see the data plain and clear, it starts becoming easier to target your ideal audience as you narrow it down more and more. You accomplish this by conducting tests where you limit your budget based on the test you’re doing and don’t push out the full marketing effort until after you’ve done tests and know what is converting.

To test your website and make it better you can use a tool like Convert.com. Every plan opens all aspects of the experiments to you, just different numbers of them. You can do A/B experiments easily using this a/b testing software. It integrates with software you already use and offers its own software too.

You Can Predict Your Target Customer’s Behavior

The more tests you complete, the better you’ll become at predicting their behavior. But you won’t just make a guess. You’ll make an educated guess and then test that guess with a limited amount of your audience to see if you’re right. Then you’ll tweak it to try to get more, and before you know it you’ve perfected getting your target audience to respond – which will carry over to other campaigns.

You’ll Waste Less Money

You’ll foresee holes in your campaigns before you spend too much money. Plus, you’ll have a clear picture of how much money you need to accomplish your goals. For example, if you know that you need to sell 1000 items to reach your money goals, using the numbers you can figure out how many to target, how much your budget is, and so much more just by having an idea about the numbers to start with.

You’ll Get Closer to the Perfect Customer Experience

Each test you create will help you get even closer to your target audience’s perfect customer experience. You can think you know something, but you won’t really know it until you test it. That includes website colors, button text, headlines, video or no video, and so forth. Just remember to only test one thing at a time so that you really know.

You’ll Be Able to Budget Better

The more you know about your numbers and the metrics regarding whatever it is you’re doing – whether it’s email marketing, social media marketing, paid ads, or anything else, the better you’ll be at setting your budget. For example, if you know you need to reach 50,000 of your target audience to make your money goals, then you know how much that’s going to cost you too.

3 Steps For Effective A/B Split Testing

Effective A/B split testing can be done in 3 easy steps. First, you define your goal, then you determine the metrics you need to analyze, and finally, you set up your test.

1. Define Your Goal

When it comes down to it, your goal is your most important factor here. When you set a goal, it needs to be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Results-focused
• Timely

It’s a very important part of setting goals and if you follow the SMART acronym, you’ll never make a goal-setting mistake again.  A good example of a goal is to state, “I want to get 1000 more email list subscribers within the next 12 months.” But take it further by stating how you’re going to do it. “I want to get 1000 more list subscribers in the next 12 months and to do that I’m going to market and give away a lead magnet that the target audience will want and find useful.”

2. Determine the Metrics You Need to Analyze

Now that you have your goal set, and you know how you want to reach that goal, you’ll need to use your email autoresponder software to study this metric. Or, if you use software to create landing pages you can use their analytics to study the metrics and data generated from your efforts. Once you know how you’ll analyze the data, you can set up your test using that information.

3. Set Up Your Test

To set up the above, you’ll need to create the following:

• Lead magnet
• Sign-up form
• Autoresponder series

Then you’ll need to drive traffic to the lead magnet landing page or sign-up form using various methods such as content marketing, paid ads, and social media marketing. There are many things within this that you can test. But you want to test one thing at a time.

In this case, since our goal is to get 1000 new subscribers with this lead magnet, we’re going to test the sign-up form. Once it’s done, you want to change one thing to find out which works best. For example, this could be the sign-up button. Maybe on one, you put the words, “Yes! I Want to Learn More Now!” and on the other, you just put, “Subscribe”. This means you create two separate sign-up forms on two identical landing pages.

You can set up the test by using Google Ads and ask Google Ads to send half the traffic to one version of your form and half the traffic to the other version. You can even do this manually by setting up two separate ads using the same target audience on Facebook but send one group to A and one group to B.

Once it’s done you simply give it enough time to generate the traffic needed to get a good result. When you have a clear indication of what is working best, you can use retargeting to redeliver the version that worked to the people who did not sign up with the other version. You can also plan your next test to further improve an aspect of your campaign.

Free Checklist: A Guide To Business Systems And Automation

Your target audience is one of the most important starting points in all the A/B split testing you do. You need to study them so that you have a place to begin at with each test you conduct. Your A/B testing statistics allow you to develop systems and procedures that provide a
very specific result. To discover more, download my free checklist, A Guide To Business Systems And Automation. Once you start seeing success in your choices, you’ll know you’re really on your way to exploding your business to the next level.