3 Unconventional Ways to A/B Test your Website
If your website performance is not at its peak, here are a few A/B testing ideas that you may not have already tried.
Seasoned marketers know A/B testing to be an essential part of any digital sales funnel setup. A/B testing is a way of comparing two or more versions of the same marketing tactic to help marketers gather data on which version of that tactic yields better results. Some A/B testing examples include using different content or images within Facebook ads, different subject headlines in email marketing campaigns, or differentiated landing pages to compare performance.
If you are a big fan of A/B testing like we are, however, you may want to know about some unconventional ways to weave it into your digital marketing strategy and increase your website conversion rate. Here are some ideas for how to dig one or two levels deeper than your typical A/B testing methods.
1. Let load times reveal your weakest links
It may seem counterproductive to play around with the load time on your website. Who wants to wait, anyway?
What we mean by A/B testing load times on your website is serving different versions of photos and other website elements to different website visitors. This determines which items are slowing down your website. This process can be quite revealing to expose anything that can be eliminated.
When working on a mobile-optimized website, in particular, load time is even more important because the user’s screen prioritizes the elements of each page. Large images or carousels can very often be significantly slowing down the load time of your website and turning away impatient visitors. Eliminating those items, then testing them against other versions, however, is how one can efficiently decide what stays and what goes.
2. Optimize for social media shares
There are many ways to A/B test social media, including comparing performance between different days of the week and times of day, videos versus graphics, and long-form versus short copy. To A/B test social media visitors using your website, however, try moving the social buttons that typically reside under the title of blog articles to different locations, or eliminating them. In some cases, removing those clunky “like,” email, and share buttons can actually result in more visitors sharing your link directly to their social media feeds.
3. Experiment with your website navigation
It can be tough deciding on the many different options for the flow of your website navigation. If you happen to be stuck between a couple of different website flows, A/B testing can make the choice a lot easier.
One option would be to play around with your secondary and primary navigation bars. If you have a website with a heavy list of secondary navigation items that take up a large space at the bottom, try moving them into a dropdown menu in the primary navigation bar and see how much it affects the click rate on those items. For landing pages where a specific call-to-action is the priority, sometimes removing the navigation bar entirely can lead to a page that sells more by distracting less.
The ultimate goal of any A/B test is to increase sales online. So, gathering conversion rate data in any place possible within your marketing efforts gives your marketing team both the factual information needed to make decisions and the inspiration to create new campaigns.
Love A/B testing but need some technical help to get this done? Contact the Cazarin team today to discuss how to improve your website conversion rate.
Let us know if we can help you in any way by emailing marketing@cazarin.com.
