Top Recommended A/B Testing Tools for 2021 ( Step-by-step guide for Marketers)

Driving your business or brand is usually high on the priority list for goals. Essentially, you want to maximize your impact and increase sales for your product or service in an optimized form.

Many businesses have adapted A/B Testing tools to help them determine the best way to do this in a digital setting. 

But, what exactly is it? There are probably many questions that arise with the concept of incorporating A/B Testing with your business or brand, such as:

• How can you implement it quickly with your business? 
• How do you know which areas to focus on to create the testing?
• How do you go about developing the testing, and know what data to collect?

1. OVERVIEW OF A/B TESTING

Running these tests for your business can develop many benefits, such as increasing the average order value, driving more streamlined purchasing, and enhancing the overall shopping experience for every customer. 

A/B Testing provides insights to help with long-term objectives, allowing your brand to make things more convenient as time goes on.

The below article will share vital, in-depth information regarding A/B Testing and how you can set up the two versions within your metrics to track performance. 

You will soon be able to clearly develop and define goals utilizing A/B Testing to help you make the best decisions for the future of your business by measuring the outcomes and implementing new features.

2. WHY SHOULD YOU INCORPORATE A/B TESTING?

If you experience any issues with your current business production, it can be helpful to do A/B testing. Business brands’ experience includes identifying and assessing issues with low conversion rates, low engagement, or unqualified leads for sales.

A/B Testing is a way to help not only identify but to improve and maximize all of those efforts. Some of the reasons you should strongly consider A/B Testing:

• Increase your ROI - acquiring high, quality traffic is crucial for businesses, and conducting testing will help you do this without spending a lot of money or overusing your budget. Small changes can result in considerable increases in sales and conversions.

• Eliminate the Guessing - Designing online stores incorporates many factors, from colors to visual preferences. Still, if you continually run A/B tests for different versions, you can eliminate all guessing games and have actual data to back up your decisions.

• Customizing Designs - You can further target your audience more aptly instead of mimicking other competitors by conducting A/B testing for your designs. The results will be specific to your business and appeal to your ideal consumers.

• Bounce Rate Reduction - bounce rates happen due to consumers having too difficult a time on your website, sifting through multiple options with too many for choosing, or just a confusing process. Running an A/B test can help you find the best versions that eliminate those pain points with visitors and improve their experience so that they spend more time exploring and, eventually, converting.

• Redesign without the Redesign - A/B testing helps you implement small changes without having to do a whole renovation on your websites. Sometimes, if your site undergoes too big changes, you lose the consumers you already had converted, and it’s like starting over again. Analyzing results from A/B testing helps only to make small feature changes to please your current customers and drive new ones.

A/B testing is a brilliant, cost-effective method for evaluating your brand websites and gaining knowledge to help make drastic, lasting improvements.

3. WHAT IS A/B TESTING, EXACTLY?

A/B Testing, which is also known as split testing, is an experiment and process where you take two versions of your online variables like a web page or landing page, show it to different website visitors at the same time, and it helps to determine which of the two versions makes more of an impact. 

The idea behind A/B testing helps business owners take the guesswork out of optimizing their website, allowing your team to make well-informed decisions.

One of the best examples of A/B testing you can explore would be Amazon, which changes its product detail pages. The buying feature has two buttons, a “Buy Now” to skip your shopping cart and go right to checkout, or the “Add to Cart” button. 

The two-button layout was an A/B Testing experiment in which their online team discovered it created a more optimized buying experience for consumers on the landing page tester:

The A/B Test experimented with the number of buttons on their product pages to see more increased sales. Running A/B tests similar to this helps you compare or temporarily implement differences with a goal in mind, with two versions of the same marketing point. 

Having multiple users utilize both versions then creates metrics you can track to determine which version has more of an impact on consumers.

The metrics for conversion will be different for each website, so if you have multiple sites selling other things, you don’t want your A/B tests to be the same across each. 

Analyzing your consumers and discovering ways to conduct tests will help to boost business sales and revenue. Still, you have to know your audience in order to increase your website performance successfully.

4. CONDUCTING A/B TESTING

To conduct an AB testing service for your own business, you first have to establish the versions you want to track. 

For example, if you’re going to increase the number of sales on your purchase pages with your buttons as Amazon did, you could start with an A/B test to find out something such as whether or not the color of your buttons matters for a click-through rate.

The steps would include:

1. Defining Conversion Objective - establishing your goal is first and foremost when conducting these experiments. In this case, we are going to measure the click-through rates for your website.
2. Design the Testing - How many people do you want to test to get a decent reading? What customers would you like to participate in the testing, existing or new customers? 
3. Collect all of the Data - Do you plan to run your test with or without A/B Testing Tools? How long do you want to run the test and gather data?
4. Analyzation - Now that you have gathered everything, can you determine the two versions’ higher impact on your conversion metric (click-throughs)?

Once you have set up and performed your A/B test, you should be confident in moving forward with the winning variable that provided you with the higher click-throughs and see your uptick in sales revenue as a result. 

These tests are not meant to occur one time. Suppose at any point you can identify marketing trends changing or new implementations that might make a difference. In that case, you should incorporate more AB testing services and make changes as necessary for your conversions.

You should remember that none of these experiments will yield insightful results if you do not have a good marketing strategy in place already. Promoting your business and building a client base takes time, and you want to be sure that you have not harmed your efforts by incorporating factors with negative impact. 

It can be beneficial using last-click attribution to reward your affiliate marketers for helping with business promotion. It will help you identify and target your consumers more accurately and drive more traffic to your websites.

5. WHAT AREAS CAN YOU A/B TEST?

Another important aspect of A/B testing you must recognize to aid your business goals is that there is almost no limit to what you can test. 

Every area of your content within your pages that reaches your audience has the potential to undergo these subtle changes for improvements. If you want to optimize and reach maximum potential, you can perform testing on multiple elements, such as:

• Website Copy - Copy across your pages incorporates headlines, subheadlines, and the body of the content. Keeping things concise and to the point is a great technique, but you should be cautious about the headlines you’re using to grab their attention and the writing style, as well as the formatting that you use to keep them engaged throughout your web pages.

• Website Design/Layout - Your website design and layout include images of products, videos that provide storytelling, and advertisements. Answering all consumer questions while keeping things short is crucial. Using visual aids that include charts and graphs, colors, and overall schemes can be adjusted to add more interactive and appealing features.

• Structure - Developing ease in navigation for your visitors is another critical aspect you can easily track in your A/B tests. Ease of use is one of the highest priorities for consumers to make that purchase in the end. So it is a good idea to keep things accessible with your structure as much as possible and examine ways to make small changes in horizontal or vertical drop-downs or create a “one-stop-shop” for certain products that work together.

• Call To Action - This is where your customers get more involved within your website. Depending on your specific product or service, customers may want to see more interaction or less. So, you can perform tests to look into what content or interactive pieces provide you with the most engagement, experimenting with the sizes of your product images and whether or not customers fill out forms. 

• Forms - Here is yet another area where you might perform testing to see the best way to get your customers to get in touch with your business and provide you with more lead quality. Some consumers may enjoy longer forms in some cases, and others may want a much shorter version so that you can perform testing on the lengths alongside the content within your forms.

There are so many other parts that you can break down and experiment with across your websites. 

Forms for purchasing, reviews, recommendations from existing customers, payment method options, and the addition of a blog that provides more in-depth content can also be part of your A/B testing. 

6. A/B TESTING SOFTWARE OPTIONS

You don’t necessarily need to work with AB testing software, but it can be helpful to implement, and having third-party software can make things easier for your marketers and designers to set up and run. 

Here is a breakdown to provide you with some of the best AB testing tools and AB testing software that are currently on the market for your business needs:

1. Crazy Egg - you can test your product pages, landing page tester, and more, adding elements to monitor the results in real-time.

2. Visual Web Optimizer - VWO - you can create and run A/B tests with this without using any code and make subtle changes to monitor results across multiple devices.

3. Google Optimize - utilizing google analytics and A/B testing together, you can run personalized tests for free with this, testing multiple elements on the same webpage.

4. Optimizely - you can use this visual editor to run multiple tests on the same page and test variations on all your channels, including messaging platforms.

5. Omniconvert - offering a development-focused tool with coding for Javascript, CSS, and HTML, Omniconvert helps you to run more advanced A/B tests, tracking as many variables as you would like with just one line of code. 

7. A/B TEST COMPLETION

The data and criteria that you focus on will inform you which of the two variations being used is the clear winner. Monitoring and tracking performance will show you that you have established which factor comes out on top based on that amount and length. 

It is important to note that you should not just move forward with a strategy or implementation based on one test that is on its own. 

Most of these smaller, more customizable A/B tests that you run will give you guidance and direction in which to go in. However, it does not provide an overall picture. 

Take, for example, going back to the click-through conversion rates. When you factor in the winner of the click-through on a landing page tester, you also need to do a deeper dive into how many of those actual click-throughs are resulting in the purchase. In some cases, you might find that more clicks do not automatically generate more buying and increase sales and revenue. 

It would be most helpful to examine more data surrounding your tests or even run more A/B tests to ensure that you input a proper converting strategy. Understanding the effects of your A/B test is essential. Analyze your tests by checking on multiple factors, which may include:

• Other actions within your web page store such as engagement, page visits, and buttons. Click-throughs contain multiple facets, and each click-through area across your webpage should be given its own A/B test for you to establish your strategy. 

• Sales that look at the average order value and the number or types of products/services sold more. Make sure you are continually assessing sales and seeing what factors play into generating more leads and revenue.

• Customer variations that include changes from new vs. existing customers, whether they are using their PC or cell phone, and who is spending more. Ad campaigns can sometimes hit their mark in bringing in loads of new leads. Marketing is a massive portion of A/B testing, so it needs to be brought into your experiments to see what exactly is causing the click-throughs to happen.

These and probably many more factors need to be looked at closely when performing A/B testing to ensure you are taking in all of the determining areas that influence buyer decisions.

8. A/B TESTING SUCCESS

A/B testing is not an activity that is done one time. There is so much value found in looking at more specific needs for your consumers, and incorporating these experiments should be included within your brand’s long-term strategy. 

It can be most helpful to continually run tests and gather data that either confirms your suspicions or shows you which of the two variables will significantly impact your buyers. 

Finding ways to get more qualitative data while helping you further understand your A/B test results. It is also a good idea to add to your A/B tests with other things like a survey to gain feedback and insights from your consumers so that you can assess what needs to change and what can stay as-is across your web pages.

Your team should brainstorm new routes to take within your A/B testing service. It is an excellent technique to try new things and develop new ideas that you can confirm with variations. Something that may have worked last year may need to be looked at again and reconfigured with testing. 

The process can be overwhelming with these aspects of your brand or business. Remember that there is no one “perfect” design that there are tons of variations and changes that will happen as you progress. 

A/B testing is a way to help your business get closer to optimizing your website for your customers in the best fashion.

Anytime you run into issues or have questions about what will work better or have the most significant impact - you can run an A/B test and collect information to establish and make the most informed decisions to move forward. 

Involve yourself in each step to identify areas that may need a more in-depth follow-up, and use that informative data to create your implementation for strategy. 

A/B testing will become a treasured and valuable tool to improve your brand’s impact. It also benefits your business to reduce risks when undergoing new designs and to keep up with ever-changing consumer needs. 

Help yourself by avoiding a business downfall and start creating some A/B tests for improvement.