What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing is the trial of different options on your website. Essentially allowing you to run trials on your site without discarding your previous work. This allows you to make small adjustments within the site and track to see which altered version is more effective. Once you’ve enacted these alterations you can analyze how they perform. From here you can choose which version best serves your website. A hypothesis is an educated “guess” about which option you believe will work best. A/B testing serves as your insight and helps you make the best decision.
How to use an A/B Test
When creating and maintaining a website you have a lot of decisions to make. Like…
What color should the header be? Which image will resonate best with my users? What thumbnail makes users want to click on the video?
If you’re stuck between which two photos to use on your homepage A/B testing can help. The first step is to go to Google Optimize to run a test. Here you can make these small changes and test your hypothesis. Based on user characteristics such as search engines you can have different users see different versions of your page. One set of users will see the original homepage photo while users coming from a different search engine will see the new altered photo. Once you’ve determined a control group and focus group you can set parameters to test the effectiveness. This like page scrolling and viewer sessions will help you to measure which test is more effective. After running this test for a period of time you can compare the results and implement the most effective alteration.
https://support.google.com/optimize/answer/6211930#create-a-hypothesis