3 Reasons Why A/B Testing is a Must for Conversion Rate Optimization

The most interesting man in the world A/B tests…(image source)

A/B testing is your friend. Companies have products and services. People need products and services. Companies need money to survive. People have money. I love fresh banana and chocolate protein milk shakes.

Five of these things I just mentioned go very well together…but man I love bananas!

If you’re a company and are spending money on PPC, I congratulate you on making the smart decision to use marketing dollars to drive traffic to your website. However, what are you doing with that traffic when it gets to you?

If you’re like most businesses, I bet you are sending the traffic to your home page. If you’re a bit smarter, you’ll at least be sending the appropriate product or service traffic to their respective product or services pages on your site.

If you want to really make a difference to your bottom line, you’ll learn what A/B testing is and how that can make a HUGE impact on your conversion rates.

Here are 3 reasons why A/B testing is a must for conversion rate optimization:

1. You Don’t Know What Your Target Audience Really Likes

If you only send your PPC traffic to a single page, and never anywhere else, you’re going to get a nice flat conversion rate. It could be super awesome so you never want to touch your website, or it could be absolutely terrible and you don’t know what to do.  In both scenarios, I’m going to tell you to start A/B testing.

You may ask why I would suggest such a thing if you fall in the category of getting lucky with a great converting website. I would counter and ask, “could it be better?”

In most cases, the answer to that is an super loud YES!

The only way to find out though is to test a different variant against it. Building and constantly testing new variants is the best and easiest way to increase your conversion rates and truly find what resonates with your target audience. Here is a little graphic we use on our home page to show people why we love A/B testing:

2. You Change. So Does Your Audience.

I used to hate pickles. Now I love them. People grow up and change. So will your target audience. As each generation moves through your products, they will interact and expect things differently.

A/B testing allows you to keep modifying and test new pages and layouts that may resonate better with your target audience. Don’t be static…you may get away with it for a while, but over time, you will see your numbers start to decline. Stay active and test.

3. A/B Testing Works

I couldn’t just sit here drinking my Banana and chocolate protein shake without giving you a little proof that it works. I test pages for our clients every day.

No, not all tests are for the better, and no, not all are as drastic as this example…however, these kinds of ‘wins’ happen; and when they do, you or your client will LOVE the results 🙂

Meet Master Muffler. We created an initial landing page for them (in this case about safety & emissions inspections). We were converting pretty good at around 10%. I was happy with this number. The client was happy with this number. Did we stop there? You can bet your marbles we didn’t!

Here is what the original page looked like:

My designer whipped up a nice new look and our conversion rates jumped 129%!

We are now converting at 22.5% with a 96% confidence rating. That’s a high enough confidence for me, so I’ve made this variant the new champion and am going to have another landing page variant made to test it further 🙂

Here is what the new variant looked like:

And here is the proof that my designer rocks:

Now let’s dance.