The Importance of A/B Testing

A common part of every project that is often overlooked is A/B testing. This does surprise me as it is one of the most beneficial processes in working out what converts best as you are gathering data from real users of your site. A lot of the time, this is overlooked on larger projects due to budget and time, but there are a lot of tools out there which make A/B testing quick and simple while you can gather data at the same time. Two different tools out there which we have used recently are UnBounce and Optimizely. 

UnBounce

Not only does UnBounce offer A/B testing facilities they also slice the page for you. Once your page is designed you just need to implement the design and UnBounce generates the slice. You can have as many experiments you like running at one time, and you can also track and A/B test all elements on the page. UnBounce also provide many case studies on their site about what has worked best for conversion on previous A/B test experiments 

Optimizely

Optimizely is a really great tool which is simple to use. To implement you just need to insert a line of Javascript, where you can then login and change words, and resize and move elements. It doesn’t impact on page load times and you can run as many experiments as you like at one time. Optimizely uses both first and third party cookies to uniquely identify visitors. When a new visitor comes to a page with an experiment, they get bucketed into one of the active variations. Each time a visitor takes an action that you are tracking, a tracking beacon is set to Optimizely. It then logs the event data.