A Comprehensive Guide to A/B Testing
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How do you run an A/B test?
Running A/B tests is more than just changing a few colors or moving a few buttons—it’s a process that starts with measuring what’s happening on your website, finding things to improve and build on, testing improvements, and learning what worked for your customers.
Check out our comprehensive guide on how to do A/B testing for your website—everything on developing, evaluating, and optimizing A/B tests. Until then, here’s a quick framework you can use to start running tests:
Developing and setting up A/B tests
From getting a clear understanding of user behavior to connecting problems to opportunities for improvement, the A/B testing process for websites is all about your users.
Researching ideas
A/B testing focuses on experimenting with theories that evolved by studying your market and your customers. Both quantitative and qualitative research help you prepare for the next step in the process: making actionable observations and generating ideas.
Collect data on your website’s performance—everything from how many users are coming onto the site and the various conversion goals of different pages to customer satisfaction scores and UX insights.
Use heatmaps to determine where users spend the most time on your pages and analyze their scrolling behavior. Session recording tools also help at this stage by collecting visitor behavior data, which helps identify gaps in the user journey. This can also help you discover problem areas on your website.
Identifying goals and hypotheses
Before you A/B test anything, you need to identify your conversion goals—the metrics that determine whether or not the variation is more successful than the original version or baseline.
Goals can be anything from clicking a button or link to purchasing a product. Set up your experiment by deciding what variables to compare and how you’ll measure their impact.
Once you’ve identified a goal, you can begin generating evidence-based hypotheses. These identify what aspects of the page or user experience you’d like to optimize and how you think making a change will affect the performance.
Executing the test
Remember, you started the A/B testing process by making a hypothesis about your website users.
Now it’s time to launch your test and gather statistical evidence to accept or reject that claim.
Create a variation based on your hypothesis of what might work from a UX perspective, and A/B test it against the existing version. Use A/B testing software to make the desired changes to an element of your website. This might be changing a CTA button color, swapping the order of elements on the page template, hiding navigation elements, or something entirely custom.
The goal is to gather data showing whether your test hypothesis was correct, incorrect, or inconclusive. It can take a while to achieve a satisfactory result, depending on how big your sample size is.
