Increased ROI with Landing Page Optimization – A/B (Split) Testing

The festive season and Christmas sales always draw my attention to latest trends in ecommerce and online marketing. Ecommerce has been my favourite topic since my college days in UK. I was so amazed by amazon’s story, that I had one small dissertation written on the strategies opted by amazon and how they got so successful to become a role model for ecommerce industry. One thing I always liked about them is their ability to test and then make changes according to the analysis. Well, Today I am going to talk on the same lines, Landing Page Optimization with A/B Testing.

You must be familiar with the term “A/B Testing” or “Split Testing”. It is basically a mechanism where you can have two or more versions of the landing page with changes in the page elements and then analyse users’ reaction on each page and decide which version is performing best. Sounds too technical, isn’t it?? Let’s understand this with an example:

Tom sells customised t-shirts and accessories like key chains, coffee mugs etc. on his website. Although his products are good quality and can interest any audience, his conversion rate is not that great. He uses Pay per Click advertising to sell his products and uses particular category page as landing page for his users. E.g. someone searching for “customized photo frame” would land up on www.tomswebsite.com/custom-photo-frames/, where he would have different designs and shapes of photo frames. Users can click on particular photo frame and customize it with different options available, but that would be on www.tomswebsite.com/custom-photo-frames/frame1/. Now, he decides to do A/B Testing with product details page. He has another version of the product details page, with same color theme but with increased picture size, different “Call To Action” button text and larger heading font.

So, A/B Testing is presenting whole new different page(s) to your visitors where as in multivariate testing you only change some elements on the same page (More on multivariate testing in the later post). You can decide how much percentage of traffic should go to variations pages that you have created for better decision making at the end of the full exercise, e.g. if you have two variations and one original page, you can decide to split the total traffic between all three of them, or say 50% to two variations and 50% to original page. The image below will explain it better:

Advantages of A/B or Split Testing

• Get to know your audience better
• Improved CTR (Click Through Rate) = Lower CPC (Cost Per Click) = Higher Quality Score
• Fast Results
• Results with solid proof

Testing should be on every marketer’s list as you never know which combination will work out the best. Even if your ROI is good, it can be improved with testing.

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Tagged as: a/b testing, google website optimizer, increased roi, landing page optimization, pay per click, PPC, split testing