Two Great Examples of A/B Testing

Published: May 22 2014

At Csek Creative, We have been spending a lot of time lately setting up A/B campaigns for businesses in the Kelowna area (and beyond).

We thought we would take some time and share some of the interesting results we have been seeing.

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What is A/B Testing?

That is an important first question! An A/B test is when you provide two  (or more) alternative versions of a page on your website, and see which one “performs better”.

What “performs better” actually means for a business can change from case to case. Sometimes it means that a customer purchased bought a product online – other times it means that they simply entered their email address in a form and generated a lead.

An easy way to visualize what this looks like is to think of a page on a website that allows you to buy a product. On that page, there is a big red “buy now” button.
 

 

We see that not a whole lot of people are clicking that button. We hypothesize that the red button is too bold and daring, so we want to try a green one instead.

We can set up a A/B test that will give a red button to 50% of the visitors to the page, and a green one to the rest.
Then we set up a “goal”. We want to track how often that button gets clicked.

After the test is complete, we can see a very accurate report of how often each button was clicked, and which one had a higher conversion rate. The variation with the higher conversion rate wins!

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A/B Test Example #1

So what does this actually look like in the real world? Well to get the ball rolling, and to show we practice what we preach, and that we aren’t shy about showing how we strive to improve our services every day – lets take a quick look at the Csek Creative homepage.

Problem Definition

We see a lot of traffic end up on the homepage of CsekCreative.com, and we wanted to make sure the traffic ended up going deeper into the site (ie: decrease our bounce rate).

This was the top of the Csek Creative homepage before the test.

We took a good long look at what we were saying to visitors as soon as they landed on our site. The first thing we were saying was “Csek Creative is a Kelowna based digital agency that delivers the results that make business sense”.

We often use that verbiage in our “elevator pitch”. We pride ourselves in being an agency that delivers more than just pretty pictures and creative concepts – we deliver products that help businesses grow.

However, we asked ourselves – “does that actually help explain to visitors what we actually do?” We were worried that it might be too vague, and as a result, we may have been losing traffic!

The Test

Testing the theory wasn’t difficult. We simply changed the text on the homepage to something that was more descriptive of our services.

“Csek Creative is a Kelowna based digital agency that delivers the results that make business sense” became “Csek Creative is a digital agency that helps companies with their online and offline marketing needs”.

The Results

The change we made to the homepage was relatively minor, so we weren’t expecting major changes in traffic patterns, but we definitely saw some improvements! After providing both the original text, and the updated text to over 600 site visitors, we found that the new text resulted in an 8.2% increase in click-throughs to the rest of our site!

That means that an additional 8 out of every 100 visitors were wanting to find out more information about us than before we did the test.

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A/B Test Example #2

OkanaganHockey.com is another great example of how A/B testing can help optimize your sales funnel.

Okanagan Hockey Schools is a great Penticton based organization with operations all over western Canada that helps youth perfect their game during the off-season.

They recently they launched a new website, and we worked with them to help make sure that the sales process was working as smoothly as possible.

Problem Definition

Okanagan Hockey Schools has a lot of different camps, and they are all offered at different skill and age levels. As a result, they have a lot of information they need to share with customers.

While this information is important, We were concerned that it may be more important to help site visitors find out more about the actual camps that are offered first.

This is what the original camps page looked like:

The Test

We had a couple of concerns:

1. The “filters”  (“birth year” and  “focus”) may have been causing problems/confusion for some site users.
2. The actual camps were pretty low on the page. The user actually had to scroll a fair bit before they would see camps.

So, with that in mind, we simply removed the filters. The new variation looked like the below:

The Results

Just like Example 1, the change that was applied to the page was pretty minor.

So what “goal” were we tracking? We tracked how many visitors clicked through to find out more information about a camp.

The results? An 88.8% increase in clicks.

The amount of traffic that flowed through to the actual camps nearly doubled.

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Why A/B Testing is Important

We have said it many times before: getting traffic to your site is only half the battle. The other half is getting that traffic to convert into a sales lead.

A/B testing allows us to tweak and continuously improve your site until it is a well-oiled, lead-generating, machine.

To talk to us about how A/B testing could be integrated into your business, shoot us a message.