A/B Testing Best Practices

A/B testing opens the opportunity to learn about an audience’s behavior and then use these findings to optimize a campaign. Using A/B testing discovers top performing aspects of a campaign, such as top performing creatives, the ideal target audience, and thus minimizing the cost for the rest of the campaign.

Lets dig deeper into the method of A/B testing and how these methods can be used to drive more traffic and conversions.

 

What is A/B testing?

Used as a method to optimize campaigns, A/B testing uses different versions of components such as visuals, headlines, creatives, landing pages, etc.  Essentially, the campaigns should appear similar except for a few details that can affect a user’s behavior. For example, you could choose a variation of a word, such as “great” versus “awesome”. These variations are then randomly chosen to be shown to users, followed by measuring the performance of each test.

 

How to use A/B testing in native campaigns

A/B tests can be set up anywhere in the funnel. When testing the first stage of the funnel, try different titles or images to compare what will capture the user. Another common test is using the same visual with different copies, multiple images with one copy, or completely different creatives across the board. It is recommended to test 3-5 different ad creatives when launching a campaign and then continuously refreshing your ads as time proceeds.

Moving further into the sales funnel, you can test different pre-landers or landing pages. Most tracking tools will allow for setting up multiple URL’s that redirect users to different webpages at random.

When using different assets for the A/B test, ensure that they are relevant to each other and make sense. It is key that the variations are different. If they are too similar, they’re less likely to produce varying results.

Because A/B testing is essentially running two ads, it will yield a higher cost. But the result will further determine what is best performing for your audience, thus allowing for optimization, and eventually lower cost.

 

Measuring your results

Start by comparing conversions and revenue of each variation. Measure engagement metrics, such as bounce rate and other KPI’s to determine the most efficient variation of the test.

If you’d like to go a bit deeper, click maps are a great resource to determine what’s working on that page. Use this information to optimize your pages for top performance.

 

Wrapping it up

A/B testing is on the most efficient ways to set up a campaign for success. Determining what’s working and what’s not will only allow for further optimization, thus lessening your costs moving forward. Finding out which components of your funnel are performing better among your audience are key to a successful, long-term campaign.

 

 

 

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