A/B testing is one of the most important things that you can implement into your website. You may be surprised at just how much bigger your ROI could be if you took the time to do a little experimenting. Even very minor changes can result in better engagement with your audience, higher click-through rates, and increased sales.
In the past, access to tools that would allow you to A/B test your landing pages or web copy would cost you a pretty penny, but thanks to the release of Google Optimize, now every webmaster can have access to A/B testing for free. What’s even better is that it directly integrates into the goal tracking features of Google Analytics to allow you to have even more accurate tracking for your tests. In this article, we’ll cover the many benefits of this tool and why you should start using it today to improve your website.
Boost your conversion rates
A/B testing is the absolute best way to squeeze more conversions from your traffic. Even tiny changes in your copy can dramatically increase your sales or email opt-ins. How can you do this? Try changing the colours of the buttons to stand out more or test using a different call to action that could spur your leads to commit instead of to close the page. You might also consider putting these call to actions further down in your copy so that your visitor doesn’t happen upon them until you’ve really had a chance to sell your product first.
When using Google Optimize to accomplish these goals you’ll be able to easily see which copy is getting you the most love. The dashboard will lay out your options, and tell you exactly what percentage of visitors responded to a specific call to action, image or message. You can then dump the losers and implement the winner directly into your website with just a few clicks.
Existing site metrics and audience information can be used
The best part about using Google Optimize rather than a competing tool is that all of your information is already plugged in. You can use the same goals that you’ve already set up for tracking and your existing audience information to create your test pages. This is a huge time saver over other services where you’d need to input all of that information again for each page that you want to experiment on. Optimize also plugs directly into your Google Analytics pages to allow for effortless and native tracking for your test results.
The Motley Fool is a big fan of Optimize, and according to a case study put out by Google, this financial website managed to save many man-hours worth of labour thanks to Google’s tool. Tests which would have taken them days to implement before now take as little as 10 minutes thanks to this product’s ease of use. (They also managed to up their conversion rates by a whopping 26% by A/B testing with Optimize!)
Google Optimize offers a wide variety of options for testing
You can optimize absolutely everything from your landing pages to your mobile site, and the testing editor can be as simple or as intricate as you need it to be. If you’re happy with using the WYSIWYG visual editor, then you can create your tests with an easy point and click interface. If you’d like something a little more custom though, then you can optimize even further by utilizing custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript testing.
Google Optimize also allows you to have access to a variety of different testing templates, and you can customize them to your liking. This includes the ability to change several minor details and pit them against each other or even test entirely different page layouts to pick a winner. You can also schedule your experiments to coincide with holidays or promotions, and you can choose to weigh each variable differently if you desire.
You can figure out where you’re losing visitors
The bane of every website owner is lost traffic. Why did a seemingly interested visitor click away without purchasing or subscribing? It can be hard to tell, but with A/B testing it’s possible to shed a little light on the mystery. If certain pages on your site have a high bounce rate it’s time to determine why that is, because you’re losing potential sales. By using Google Optimize you can easily run some experiments on that page to figure out what you can do to keep your visitors engaged and even convert them to clients. A multivariate approach allows you to test intricate groupings of different variables on your site to see what is driving your traffic away.
By digging into your Google Analytics data, Optimize can see exactly where you’ve lost sales. You can then optimize those pages to reduce cart abandonment. Are customers frustrated by your shipping costs? Maybe you could lure them back with a special offer? Google Optimize gives you the ability to easily test these variables and more that will make customers commit to a purchase rather than walk away empty handed.
You can test pages for specific subsets of visitors
Google Optimize allows something called redirect testing. This is where you can send visitors to an entirely different page based on certain qualifications. If you’ve found that you are getting tons of traffic from a specific country for example, then you might want to consider appealing to them more personally.
A/B testing with Google Optimize will allow you to send these users to a page that has their interests in mind. It could even be a page that sells to them using their native language, netting you more sales from users who may not speak your website’s main language perfectly and could feel uneasy about committing to a sale they don’t fully understand.
You could also try to create landing pages for smaller niches that fit within your main niche to help you understand exactly who is visiting your webpage based on responses to those pages. For example, a healthy food product could create pages targeting Keto, Paleo or other niche diet groups to see which was most successful for their ads.